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Browser Wars, Round 2 10 January 2005 On 9 November, 2004, the non-profit Mozilla Foundation released Firefox 1.0, a free internet browser designed to compete with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE). By mid-December, barely a month after the product’s launch, Mozilla celebrated the 10 millionth download of the program.
Mozilla Firefox
During this same period, the market share of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer plummetted. According to a worldwide survey conducted in late November 2004 by OneStat.com, a Dutch company that analyzes internet usage, IE’s share of browsers had dropped from 94 percent in May to less than 89 percent in November. This is the first drop in IE’s market share since 1999. Firefox, on the other hand, now has almost 5 percent of the market, and it is growing.
Firefox performs better
Firefox has a number of features which are lacking in Internet Explorer. For example, the “tab” feature allows you to have two different web pages open in the same window. Firefox loads pages faster than IE, and has a built-in search bar that allows you to search sites like eBay as well as Google.
IE is so old that the Microsoft executive in charge of defending IE to the world, Gary Schare, doesn’t even use the software. He uses a browser called Maxthon, which gives him some of the features, like tabs, that are already built in to Firefox.
Perhaps most important, Firefox is much more secure than Internet Explorer. IE’s close integration with Windows and its dominant market share make it the largest target for malicious code. As an example of how insecure IE is, officials at Pennsylvania State University recently recommended that students and staff stop using Internet Explorer because of persistent security problems. The announcement said that "the threats are real, and alternatives exist."
But improved performance is just one factor in creating a successful new product. Reducing switching costs are also important in enabling a product to succeed.
In this respect, Firefox poses a few problems for IE users. First, a few sites don’t run all that well on Firefox. As a result, I now use two browsers during the course of a day – Firefox for most of my internet work, and IE for the few sites that don’t work well with Firefox.
Second, Firefox doesn’t easily support Microsoft’s language packs, so looking at non-English websites may be problematic.
This added complexity will be a significant barrier to adoption for most users, for whom IE is “good enough.” As internet security concerns mount, however, we can expect Firefox to continue to gain market share at the expense of IE.
“Every problem was once a solution”
Microsoft’s current predicament with IE demonstrates how winning strategies can become major liabilities as competition and technology change.
The last major re-write of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer came in 1997, when IE 4.0 shipped with Windows 98. Back then, the tight integration between IE and Windows was a major advantage, both for the company and for its customers. IE 4 outstripped the capabilities of Netscape’s Navigator, then the dominant browser on the market. Because of its tight integration into the Windows 98 operating system, the barriers to usage were very low. This resulted in Microsoft’s browser quickly dominating the competition. In late November, 1998, a weakened Netscape was purchased by America Online in a $4.2 billion stock swap.
Microsoft’s successful integration approach of the past eight years is now causing it significant problems. Internet Explorer was designed during a time when security threats were not the major issues they have become. The program’s tight integration with Windows means that the next major redesign of the browser will come only with the next redesign of Windows, now scheduled for late 2006.
Firefox is a modular program – it runs as well on Windows as it does on other operating systems like Mac OS or Linux. New versions of Firefox don’t need to rely on new operating systems.
So the precise strategy that made Microsoft successful with IE in the mid 1990s now leaves it vulnerable to competition -- a case example of how yesterday’s solutions can become today’s problems.
More Information
1. The Microsoft vs Netscape story has been well-reported and analyzed by journalists like Michael Lewis, in his book The New New Thing, and by scholars like David Yoffie and Michael Cusumano, in their 1998 book, Competing on Internet Time: Lessons From Netscape and Its Battle With Microsoft.
2. The New York Times reported on Firefox’ progress on 19 December 2004. Here’s a link to that article: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F40914FA3E540C7A8DDDAB0994DC404482&incamp=archive:search
3. Professor Clayton Christensen at Harvard has done a great deal of work on the dynamics of modular and integrated products. His insights have influenced the browser discussion above. Here’s a link to a March 2004 presentation by Christensen: http://osbc.mwi.com/documents/OSBC2004_Christensen_Keynote_000.pdf
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