fact sheet: Firefox web browser

Download free Firefox web browser from: www.mozilla.com/firefox/all.html

December 2004: Firefox may reignite browser wars
March 2005: More switching to new web browser Firefox

«« Firefox may reignite browser wars

(The Age, Dec 04)

The internet browser wars, dormant for several years, shows signs of heating up again as a result of gains from a new program called Firefox. Use of Firefox, created by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, has grown by more than a third over the past month, according to research firm WebSideStory.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer retains its overwhelming dominance with 91.8 percent of the market, the report showed. But that has slipped from over 93 percent two months ago.

Microsoft, by integrating the browser into its Windows operating system crushed Netscape Navigator, which had been the dominant browser in the late 1990s, effectively ending the browser wars at the time.

But some web users are concerned about the security of internet Explorer and have been using alternatives. Firefox's stated goal of gaining 10 percent of the market over the next year no longer seems unattainable.

Netscape, which is now a part of Time Warner's America Online unit shares some of the same origins of Firefox, and includes some of the same features including "tabbed" browsing to allow several pages to be contained within a single window, accessibility to search engines and pop-up blocking.

«« More switching to new web browser Firefox

(Next, March 05)

When Bill Robertson decided last year to switch 450 workers and 100 desktops at De Bortoli Wines to the open source Firefox web browser, he had the company's future in mind.

In moving to the free Firefox, he did more than just install a web browser that rivals Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which comes for free with every PC running the Windows operating system. The CIO defined a radically new desktop interface for the company and forced his software suppliers to comply with his technology direction, which had a heavy emphasis on open standards so he would no longer be locked into any one vendor's products.

Firefox is a small and streamlined web browser created by the US-based charity The Mozilla Foundation from the bones of the Netscape and Mozilla browsers. It runs on all desktop computers and supports most languages.

Firefox is often paired with its open source sibling, Thunderbird, a free email client that competes with Microsoft's Outlook in the enterprise.

Standards in the computing industry define how systems should interact with each other. They determine the rules of the computing road.

Mr Robertson, CIO at De Bortoli Wines and based in Griffith, NSW, doesn't understand why his peers elsewhere choose to be locked in to Microsoft's strategy. "I'm staggered and close to offended that some businesses choose the risk of vendor lock-in, and I'm staggered by the timidity of some IT managers," he says.

Mr Robertson mandated De Bortoli use free software productivity suite OpenOffice for tasks such as word processing after reading open standards studies from around the world.

On standards, Firefox has an advantage over Explorer. That gives organisations latitude to commit to standards rather than to products. That in turn reduces the leverage that vendors have over customers.

Microsoft has hampered standards support in Explorer for five years with its go-slow campaign against the web. Standards-oriented page layout is not possible on most versions of Explorer (CSS box model). Explorer has never met standards for web document identification (HTTP MIME content types), or if one is supported, then simultaneously the other is not.

Microsoft has shown an antipathy to web standards, because in the view of many they provide an alternative to the Windows desktop - Microsoft's core business. The success of web-based applications such as Amazon, Google, eBay, the open source Wikipedia encyclopedia and online banking point to the decreasing importance of Windows in a world where a web browser is sufficient.

Mr Robertson says Firefox's development community of more than 900 software engineers worldwide - many in Australia - was key when it came to selecting Firefox.

"Firefox has the best pedigree, with an active engineering community, wide community support and long history," he says. "It run(s) on most popular platforms. It has a consistent and stable interface, nice features like tabbed browsing and can be extended should we need to modify it or add to it."

Tabbed browsing lets users open several webpages at once without filling the screen with a clutter of separate windows.

Firefox has been downloaded nearly 40 million times since its release last November. (Download free from www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/)

Web metrics analysts OneStat and WebSideStory say usage globally and the US, respectively, hovers around 8.5 per cent, up from 2 per cent just nine months ago - dangerously close, from Microsoft's perspective, to the 10-15 per cent "tipping point" needed to gain a critical mass. Once Firefox has that level of support - equal to about 100 million users - businesses must seriously consider supporting the technology or risk losing customers.

Such an outcome further erodes Microsoft's ability to mandate the shape of the web, and opens the door wider to alternative operating systems such as Apple's OS X and Linux.

Such is the case with the Roads and Traffic Authority of NSW, which serves 8000 users through a mixed fleet of Apple iMacs and Windows PCs at more than 250 sites. CIO Greg Carvouni says Mozilla web browser deployment saved the government department 20 per cent of its annual budget - about $2 million - through a reduction in software licences and staff reductions.

"Because we have both Macintoshes and PCs, we wanted something truly cross-platform," Mr Carvouni says. "We don't feel locked-in because there are other standards-oriented free browsers also available for the Macintosh."

Despite its open source deployment, the authority is committed to proprietary technologies from Microsoft, where it has seen the relationship prosper: "Microsoft is keen to be competitive ... They don't want us moving more desktops away from Windows. They are cheaper to deal with now than they used to be."

Chris Hofman, Mozilla Foundation director of engineering, says people are learning to love the browser and email suite at home, and want that experience at work, while IT managers are glad to see that they have a choice. He urges IT managers to work with their systems' integrators when it comes time to build the software into their systems.

Firefox's developers goal is to create an easier-to-use web where the surfer does not have the burden of extra training or software that slows to a crawl.

Working hard at making Firefox a better browser than Microsoft's is a trans-Tasman collaboration between Dr Robert O'Callahan, employed by Novell New Zealand, and Dr Roger Sidje, a mathematics researcher at the University of Queensland. Together, they work on Gecko, the layout engine inside Firefox responsible for displaying webpages.

Dr O'Callahan urges IT managers to feel confident about open source projects. "Open source business models are still evolving, but many open source companies are profitable, so I expect current sources of funds will persist and new ones to appear," he says.

Mozilla's Hofman points out: "With closed source, commercial software, you're pretty much at the mercy of the company that owns the technology."

Firefox and Thunderbird have had success over Explorer in the area of security. The US Computer Emergency Readiness Team found Explorer had 63 security holes, of which 21 still require a fix. Firefox and Mozilla had 11 security flaws, of which two remain to be fixed. Rival assessor Secunia puts Explorer at 20 of 79 flaws unfixed and Firefox at four of 12 flaws unfixed. CERT went as far as to recommend last July, in vulnerability note VU#713878, that to get around Explorer's insecurity, organisations should "use a different web browser".

Microsoft says its systems are targeted because they are popular, and that any system attacked as much as Windows would need as many fixes.

But Mozilla's Hofman points to the success of the Apache web server "where higher market share doesn't mean more security vulnerabilities".

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