Gavin, 1 February 05
Being technologically the best won’t win every battle. You just have to look at Sony’s Betamax against VHS; IBM’s OS/2 against DOS… but it’s the sleeping giant of microsoft that seems to have been caught of guard this time. Mozilla suites and Netscape 6 and 7 did little to dent market share of Internet Explorer. A rash of security problems and spyware infestations did little in themselves to move people to alternative browsers. Clearly what was needed was a better browser.
Now the stats for the first month of 2005 show that Firefox – a better browser by far – is being seriously adopted on a large scale. For the first time in half a decade IE has under 70% of the browser share.
With Firefox, mozilla makes it clear that they are providing the best possible browser, with an extensions system allowing a modular approach to customisation that promise to make it the best possible browser for every individual user. It is only recently I have appreciated that the decisions taken by Firefox developers to break away from the monolithic suite were right. I sort of liked the suite’s masses of clunky preferences so I could tweak my browser to oblivion.
Seeing the range of themes and extensions since Firefox 1.0, I’ve come to accept the power of the modular approach. Ben, Blake et al. had the right vision and knew how to go about giving the world a better browser and they knew it!
