[Solar-general] articulo NY times sobre firefox

[Diego Saravia]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/19/business/yourmoney/19digi.html

 	DIGITAL DOMAIN
The Fox Is in Microsoft's Henhouse (and Salivating)
By RANDALL STROSS

Published: December 19, 2004

FIREFOX is a classic overnight success, many years in the making.

Published by the Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit group supporting open-source
software that draws upon the skills of hundreds of volunteer programmers,
Firefox is a Web browser that is fast and filled with features that
Microsoft's stodgy Internet Explorer lacks. Firefox installs in a snap, and
it's free.

Firefox 1.0 was released on Nov. 9. Just over a month later, the foundation
celebrated a remarkable milestone: 10 million downloads. Donations from
Firefox's appreciative fans paid for a two-page advertisement in The New York
Times on Thursday.

Until now, the Linux operating system was the best-known success among the
hundreds of open-source projects that challenge Microsoft with technically
strong, free software that improves as the population of bug-reporting and
bug-fixing users grows. But unless you oversee purchases for a corporate data
center, it's unlikely that you've felt the need to try Linux yourself.
	
Advertisement

With Firefox, open-source software moves from back-office obscurity to your
home, and to your parents', too. (Your children in college are already using
it.) It is polished, as easy to use as Internet Explorer and, most compelling,
much better defended against viruses, worms and snoops.

Microsoft has always viewed Internet Explorer's tight integration with Windows
to be an attractive feature. That, however, was before security became the
unmet need of the day. Firefox sits lightly on top of Windows, in a separation
from the underlying operating system that the Mozilla Foundation's president,
Mitchell Baker, calls a "natural defense."

For the first time, Internet Explorer has been losing market share. According
to a worldwide survey conducted in late November by OneStat.com, a company in
Amsterdam that analyzes the Web, Internet Explorer's share dropped to less
than 89 percent, 5 percentage points less than in May. Firefox now has almost
5 percent of the market, and it is growing.

Gary Schare, Microsoft's director of product management for Windows, has been
assigned the unenviable task of explaining how Microsoft plans to respond to
the Firefox challenge with a product whose features were last updated three
years ago. He has said that current users of Internet Explorer will stick with
it once they take into account "all the factors that led them to choose I.E.
in the first place." Beg your pardon. Choose? Doesn't I.E. come bundled with
Windows?

Mr. Schare has said that Mozilla's Firefox must prove it can smoothly move
from version 1.0 to 2.0, and has thus far enjoyed "a bit of a free ride." If I
were the spokesman for the software company that included the company's
browser free on every Windows PC, I'd be more careful about using the phrase
"free ride."

Trying to strike a conciliatory note, Mr. Schare has also declared that he and
his company were happy to have Firefox as "part of the large ecosystem" of
software that runs on Windows. In fact, Firefox is ecumenically neutral, being
available also for both the Mac and for Linux.

Mr. Schare may be the official spokesman, but he does not use Internet
Explorer himself. Instead he uses Maxthon, published by a little company of
the same name. It uses the Internet Explorer engine but provides loads of
features that Internet Explorer does not. "Tabs are what hooked me," he told
me, referring to the ability to open within a single window many different Web
sites and move easily among them, rather than open separate windows for each
one and tax the computer's memory. Firefox has tabs. Other browsers do, too.
But fundamental design decisions for Internet Explorer prevent the addition of
this and other desiderata without a thorough update of Windows, which will not
be complete until 2006 at the earliest.

How fitting that Microsoft finds itself in this predicament. In late 1995, at
a time when Netscape Navigator was synonymous with the Web and Internet
Explorer had yet to attract many adopters, Microsoft made a risky but
strategically wise decision to redesign the Internet Explorer code from the
bottom up - re-architecting, in industry jargon. As Michael A. Cusumano of
M.I.T. and David B. Yoffie of Harvard chronicled in their 1998 book,
"Competing on Internet Time: Lessons From Netscape and Its Battle With
Microsoft," that decision meant delaying the release of Internet Explorer 3.0,
but the resulting product was technically far superior to Netscape's
Navigator. In Browser Wars I, the better browser won.

Today, it's the Internet Explorer code that is long overdue for a
top-to-bottom redesign, one that would treat security as integral, and Firefox
is the challenger with new, clean code. Netscape bequeathed its software to
the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, which used an open-source approach to
undertake a complete rewrite that took three years. Firefox is built upon the
Mozilla base. 

-- 
Diego Saravia 
dsa en unsa.edu.ar