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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Mozilla's browser is taking market share away from Microsoft. Sometimes, slow and steady really does win the race.
Nov 16, 2004 | To misquote F. Scott Fitzgerald, there are no second acts in the lives of software projects.
Oh sure, the developers sometimes move on to bigger and better things. When it comes to the created works, however, the trajectory is depressingly consistent: Functional simplicity gives way to feature bloat, followed by brittleness, unreliability and, barring certain monopoly-friendly market conditions, oblivion.
For the bulk of its six-year existence, the Mozilla project has been the unwitting victim and symbol of this truism. Like Jacob Marley's ghost in "A Christmas Carol," the open-source browser seemed doomed to bear the sinful weight of its earlier, proprietary incarnation -- Netscape Communicator -- for eternity.
A funny thing happened on the way to oblivion, however. With no employer to guide them and no market to punish them, Mozilla developers stubbornly kept plugging. After delivering a stable 1.0 release of its Mozilla suite of applications (including a browser and a mail client) in 2002, four years after the project's launch and about two years beyond initial estimates, they proposed an even more ambitious, ground-up overhaul of the underlying source code. Given the steady half-decade flameout of the original Netscape user population, developers went with the obvious code name: Phoenix.
"Team members wanted to do a reset," says Mozilla engineering director Chris Hofmann, looking back.
The end result has been arguably the biggest comeback story in software development since Steve Jobs retook the helm at Apple. Trademark issues have forced the Mozilla team to redesignate the project Firefox, but the browser itself has met few obstacles. The 0.9 version, released over the summer, registered more than 5 million downloads. WebSideStory, a Web analytics company, puts the combined October Mozilla-Firefox market share at 6 percent, a 71 percent jump over June market share. To cap it all off, the Mozilla Foundation, official overseer of the project since its spinout from Netscape last year, officially released the 1.0 version on Tuesday, Nov. 9, and has set itself a 10 percent market share target by the end of the year.
"This is a first," says WebSideStory analyst Geoff Johnston. "Until July, Microsoft had never lost market share. They'd had spikes, sure, but it never trended down. The bigger news now is that the trend has continued."
Granted, Microsoft's commanding portion of the browser market -- Johnston puts Internet Explorer's current market share at 92.4 percent -- is in no immediate danger of collapsing. What is in danger, however, is the trusted wisdom that open-source developers, whether through cultural prejudice or isolation from market forces, don't know how to deliver simple, consumer-friendly software tools. Cut loose from the corporate world, Mozilla's developers have hit their target: a thriving, user-friendly open-source browser. The question everyone should be asking now is: Where Mozilla has trodden, will other open-source projects follow?
