Mark DiGiovanni

Software Development and Supporting Technologies

Why Firefox could win the new browser war

Ben English and Steve Vamos seem to be out of touch. They really are not listening to their customers. If they were, Firefox wouldn't have taken the percentage of the browser market that they have --in such a short amount of time. I hope their attitude does not reflect the attitude of Microsoft as a whole. If this is the general attitude of the company, Firefox will come to dominance rather quickly.

“Microsoft's English reiterated that features such as tabbed browsing are not important to IE users.”

“Vamos, who admitted he has never used Firefox, said there is a lot of hype surrounding the open-source movement and if Microsoft's customers wanted new features, they would have told the company about it.”

Read on here.

--Mark

Published Nov 11 2004, 11:34 AM by mdigiovanni

Comments

Darrell said:

What Steve Vamos said could be the dumbest thing I've heard in a while.

# November 11, 2004 8:33 AM

carl said:

Until FireFox starts coming standard on new pc's, you aren't going to see any rise to dominance. It has done very well with the hardcore internet users and developers, but the key to the market is the casual and average user. Firefox isn't hitting those because those people are too lazy to download an alternative. My parents are perfect examples. They don't even know WTF Firefox is.

# November 11, 2004 9:25 AM

carl said:

I will add that even when they can get some OEM's to include Firefox on new pcs.... it will then take quite awhile for that to make a major impact on the statistics.

# November 11, 2004 9:26 AM

Darrell said:

Carl - what the Microsoft leaders are doing is denying that Firefox is even a threat. The last time they did that, it took them 3 years and Billions to catch up on the Internet. Yes they won, but why wait? Act now. It's like they haven't read "The Innovator's Dilemma".

# November 11, 2004 9:50 AM

dru said:

I would disagree with " Until FireFox starts coming standard on new pc's, you aren't going to see any rise to dominance." I have had three people this month see FireFox and what it can do ask me to set it up on their computer.

# November 11, 2004 12:42 PM

carl said:

Darrell - I never said Microsoft wasn't stupid for claiming Firefox isn't a threat. They are. However, that doesn't mean Firefox is going to rise up and dominate the browser market in a few short months... or even a year or 2.

Dru - Thats funny. I know plenty of people.. family and friends alike that don't even know WTF Firefox is. All are regular internet users. But to them, IE works and it is on their machine right now. They don't pay attention to the latest security threats, etc. Why do you think so many worms get spread? Because of people like them... and they are the majority, not the minority. Hell, I work in the internet industry and I know plenty of coworkers who don't even use Firefox as sad as that sounds.

Don't take this as a slight on Firefox, it is my browser as choice. But i'm not going to fool myself into believing that Mozilla is going to dominate the browser market anytime soon.

# November 11, 2004 3:25 PM