Certainly, one reason that Firefox spreads is that has a large group of loyal and hardworking zealots who develop and do quality control for the product -- and most aren't even employees of Mozilla (some are employees of other software firms and others work for free because doing so is an important part of their identity). For example, CEO John Lilly tells me that some 10,000 people each night check for bugs in the code. But the other reason that Firefox spreads is -- since everyone at Mozilla and the huge open source community that develops it are committed to excellence above all else -- it is simply a better browser than the rest. In addition to being absurdly easy to install and use, one area where Firefox has consistently walloped Explorer is security. I recall talking to an executive from a large financial services firm a couple years ago, and he told me that the security problems with Explorer were responsible for millions of dollars worth of fraud every year, but there had never been a single instance of fraud when customers used Firefox, and that it would save his company a lot of money if everyone just used Firefox. Interestingly, The New York Times story has a Microsoft executive seeming to admit that such security problems existed, at least until 2006:
"Microsoft waited five years before releasing the sixth version of Internet Explorer in 2006. Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer group, says the company was focused on plugging security holes during that time."
I admit I am biased, as I've known CEO John Lilly for a long time and think he is both wise and smart, and have been most impressed with founding CEO and now Chair Mitchell Baker every time that I have met her (See this McKinsey interview). But I am fond of lots of other people in Silicon Vally too, like the folks at Yahoo!, and I don't argue that their software is better than the rest.
Firefox is about to release version 3.0. The Times claims it runs twice as fast as 2.0 and uses less memory. I look forward to downloading it.
I use Firefox as my main browser on any computer I use—whether Windows, Mac OS X, or GNU/Linux—because it provides a decent overall user experience as an application with a decent interface, good extensibility, and good security. Unfortunately, the visual core of the browser—the layout engine—does not compare well to those in Safari or Opera, but I still usually choose Firefox over either of those because I prefer the rest of the application (the notable exception being that Flash video seems to crash my Windows system frequently under Firefox, but rarely under Safari).
The layout engine in Firefox 3 seems to have been improved, but when I tried some of the betas, I very much disliked the new bookmark system (e.g., accidentally adding bookmarks with the pop-up panel thing and waiting for the unresponsive bookmarks menu to appear), so I am not even sure if Firefox 3 will be better than Firefox 2 overall let alone whether any version of Firefox really deserves to be called better than the rest. I think Firefox is easily better than Internet Explorer, but if you consider the quality of the various layout engines, Safari and Opera both easily beat Firefox and if history is any indication, both of their layout engines seem likely to continue to evolve more quickly than that of Firefox.
Posted by: Brian Sexton | May 29, 2008 at 05:34 AM
In 2006, Microsoft released the seventh version of IE, not the sixth.
Posted by: Stifu | May 27, 2008 at 12:41 AM