FireFox Took on Microsoft VIA the NYX and They WON!

[Joshua Ronne Altemoos]

In todays National Edition of teh New York Times there is a article
abou firefox and how it is better then IE. It is on there (NYX)
website for free for a week or so but you nee dany account so i am
pasting it below.

Linux-10
Microsoft-0

Josh

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December 19, 2004
DIGITAL DOMAIN
The Fox Is in Microsoft's Henhouse (and Salivating)
By RANDALL STROSS

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.

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.

All Microsoft can offer Internet Explorer users are incremental
security improvements, new patches to fix holes in the old patches. In
Windows XP Service Pack 2, the company claimed as a major security
advance a notice that is displayed if the user takes an action within
Internet Explorer that sets off a download of a tiny application
called an ActiveX control, which can take control of your PC and, in a
worst-case instance, erase your hard drive. "Users still must make
informed decisions," Mr. Schare added. (With Firefox, users do not
have to make decisions about these miniprograms, which are blocked by
design.)

Bruce Schneier, the chief technical officer of Counterpane Internet
Security Inc. and an authority on security issues, did not hide his
anger at Microsoft's claim of having improved Internet Explorer. "When
my mother gets a prompt 'Do you want to download this?' she's going to
say yes" he said. "It's disingenuous for Microsoft to give you all of
these tools with which to hang yourself, and when you do, then say
it's your fault." He lectures his clients (and his mother): "Don't use
Microsoft Internet Explorer, period." He has been using the browser
Opera, but having tried Firefox declares it "a great alternative."

THIS month, officials at Pennsylvania State University 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."

Stuck with code from a bygone era when the need for protection against
bad guys was little considered, Microsoft cannot do much. It does not
offer a new stand-alone version of Internet Explorer. Instead, the
loyal customer must download and install the newest version of Service
Pack 2. That, in turn, requires Windows XP. Those who have an earlier
version of Windows are out of luck if they wish to stick with Internet
Explorer.

Mr. Schare of Microsoft does have one suggestion for those who cannot
use the latest patches in Service Pack 2: buy a new personal computer.
By the same reasoning, the security problems created by a car's broken
door lock could be solved by buying an entirely new automobile. The
analogy comes straight from Mr. Schare. "It's like buying a car," he
said. "If you want to get the latest safety features, you have to buy
the latest model."

In this case, the very latest model is not a 2001 Internet Explorer,
but a 2004 Firefox.

Randall Stross is a historian and author based in Silicon Valley.
E-mail:ddomain at nytimes.com.