Foxy browser

I started playing around with FireFox. Now I'm hooked. It rocks on Linux and OS X. I haven't tried it on Windows yet (which I have, as a dual-boot on an IBM T-40 laptop — Emperor Linux's Toucan), but I'm sure it's fine there too.

One of the ironies of the browser "business" is that it was ephemeral at best. True, Netscape collected an income for awhile as a harvest of good will toward a company that users (many of whom wanted to be customers) genuinely loved. It sold its browser (called Navigator, at least for awhile — I forget) on the public broadcasting model. You could also get it for free, but they preferred that you pay for it. When Microsoft nuked that model by giving Internet Explorer away, and making the browser better than Netscape's, the business was gone. My pricing away its business competition, Microsoft also removed a primary incentive to improve the browser.

Now we're seeing the same thing with Apple and Safari. When Apple came out with a free open source-based Safari, Microsoft saw a familiar strategy and had no taste for playing the Netscape role in a game Microsoft invented. So it dropped work on the next-generation IE for OS X. I know people who worked on that browser and said it was going to be a killer product — one that leapfrogged Microsoft's Windows offering (there's your intra-company competition). But alas, OS X users are stuck with a now-ancient (and terminal) version of Internet Explorer. And Safari has improved little since it was introduced in January 2003.

Meanwhile, Mozilla, open sourced by Netscape in Spring of 1998 continues to improve, now as the lean and mean FireFox (which also has a killer logo, methinks).

Okay, I just rebooted the T-40 into Windows and installed Firefox there too. It looks great and runs fast. I just went to IT Conversations and started listening to recordings there, and it works fine. So much for the torture test.

And now I'm back in Linux, where Firefox is very much at home doing the same things. Nice.

So, an appreciation to the folks there. Where pure business motivations fail, it's nice to depend on the hackers, scratching everybody's market itch, to get the job done.

I'll be reporting at greater length on Firefox, and the differences between laptop platforms, at Linux Journal soon.

Posted by dsearls, June 15, 2004 09:42 PM | | TrackBack