Posted on: Tuesday, December 28, 2004
Better living through Firefox browser?
By K. Oanh Ha
Knight Ridder News Service
SAN JOSE, Calif. — By day, Alexander Vincent is a mild-mannered secretary for a Vallejo, Calif., real-estate broker. By night, he's an online crusader protecting users of a new Internet browser from glitches and security bugs. If he were a superhero, you might call him Mozilla Man.
In fact, Vincent is part of a worldwide army of Mozilla men and women who believe in freedom, progress and the inalienable right to an open-source browser.
Their weapon of faith is Firefox, a free browser created by the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation as an alternative to Microsoft's ubiquitous Internet Explorer. Officially released in November, Firefox is converting a growing number of Internet users — and nibbling away at Microsoft's dominance.
Vincent is one of roughly 2,000 volunteer evangelists who see their mission as freeing millions of computer users from the tyranny of Internet Explorer. Mountain View, Calif.-based Mozilla — with a paid staff of 12 software developers — depends on volunteers like Vincent to help write code, fix software bugs and market the browser.
"A lot of people out there are not aware of what is possible on the Internet," said Vincent. "Firefox is waking up a lot of people."
Firefox missionaries promise an Internet experience that's faster, more secure and free from pop-up ads. And that's just the beginning of their Utopian vision. To hear many of the faithful talk, their ministry stops nothing short of changing the lives of Internet users.
"You hear a lot of tales about people having very bad online experiences. Life can be better," said Mitchell Baker, Mozilla's president. "Our end goal is to have real choice and innovation on the Web."
Test versions of Firefox were released in February. Since Firefox's official release Nov. 9, users have downloaded the browser 6 million times.
Explorer's market share has slid for the first time ever, to 92 percent from 95 percent in June, according to WebSideStory, a Web analytics firm. Firefox has gained one-half percent a month in the same period, giving it a 3.6 percent market share.
Firefox owes its growing celebrity to new converts, many of whom become preachers themselves. Take Katie Kimball, a choreographer who got fed up with pop-up ads on Explorer. Her brother-in-law suggested Firefox — and Kimball is surfing the Internet like never before, she says. Now when others complain about their computers, she offers her own testimonial. "It was a eureka moment for me," said Kimball, who lives in San Francisco. "I will never go back to Internet Explorer."
The Mozilla mania is part of a broader movement toward free, open-source software, in which no company owns the code. Open source draws upon the strength of the collective. Anyone can add features and fix flaws. Not beholden to any commercial interests, developers argue they only have users' interests at heart.
The Mozilla Project began under Netscape in 1998, when it publicly released the blueprint for its Navigator browser. Netscape was purchased by AOL, which in turn merged with Time Warner. Last year, Mozilla was established as a nonprofit and Time Warner seeded it with $2 million. The foundation is also supported by donations and partnerships from companies such as Red Hat and Sun Microsystems, which ship the free, open-source Linux operating system that rivals Microsoft's Windows.
For its part, Microsoft this year released a "major upgrade" to Explorer that "focused solely on security enhancements," and reduced spyware, said Gary Schare, director of product management for Windows, in an e-mail. The upgrade, however, covers only the browser used in the XP operating system and not older systems.
While Internet Explorer is the choice of hundreds of millions of users, "we respect that some customers will choose an alternative," said Schare. "We also know that choosing a browser is about more than a handful of features. Microsoft continues to make major investments in Internet Explorer."
Analysts and some in the open-source community say Firefox's success will be the catalyst for Microsoft to kick into high gear. "When you have an open-source software competing with a commercial software, it pushes the commercial developer to develop faster and come out with a competitive product," said Mendelson. He said Firefox "will help push Microsoft into more innovation on the Explorer, which they have neglected a bit."
