The Open Road

If "only the paranoid survive," as former Intel CEO Andy Grove used to say, then Mozilla, the organization behind the open-source Firefox browser, needs to put its paranoia on overdrive.

That's the sense I got reading through Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady's billet-doux to Chromium, the open-source project behind the Google Chrome browser. O'Grady has long been friendly to Mozilla and a dedicated user of Firefox. When his head is turned by another browser, it's time for concern.

Yes, Firefox continues to grow its market share, now sitting comfortably at 22.47 percent, while Chrome is far behind at 2.59 percent. But O'Grady is an influencer (even if he has yet to persuade me to adopt the Linux "desktop"), and his reasons for preferring Chrome are important:

The open source version of Chrome is far from perfect; the recently enabled plugins which permit the usage of Flash and so on are regularly disabled and/or non-functional, the rendering engine still has its occasional issues, and too many poorly designed browser-sniffing sites give it a hard time. But it's just so damned fast. And speed is not just a feature, but a feature I prioritize.

Not in the rendering. Although its from-scratch V8 Javascript engine definitely gives sites like Google Docs a boost, I've found Firefox 3.5's counterpart, Tracemonkey, very competitive on most sites. But that's where the good news ends for Firefox.

In virtually every other sense, Chromium outperforms Firefox. Google's browser launches more quickly, features snappier tab creation and--perhaps most importantly--doesn't bog down after prolonged usage. And while the performance gains when measured might seem minute...they really add up over time.

As O'Grady notes, his observations apply to the Linux versions of Chrome and Firefox, but they still should give Mozilla pause.

In this little war, however, perhaps Microsoft is taking Firefox's side, at least against Google. As The Register reports, Microsoft Office Web Apps, due out in 2010, will support Firefox and other "familiar Web browsers," which doesn't include Chrome, Safari (for Windows), or Opera. Apparently, Microsoft will only be supporting those browsers that don't have an operating system competitor attached to them.

The browser market has become hugely competitive and, as a result, more innovative and much more interesting. I'm confident the Mozilla team will respond to Chrome's apparent speed advantages, but equally confident that Google, Apple, and Microsoft will work just as hard to outflank Mozilla and the other browser competitors in other ways.

All of which is good for you and for me as we enjoy the results of the competition. Now if we could just get this level of competition in all areas of software.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Net Applications has finally published its browser market share numbers for July, and the results are surprising. Given European summer holidays and Mozilla Firefox's large user base in Europe (35 percent market share), Firefox should be seeing a significant decline in market share through the summer months.

But it isn't.

Instead, as detailed below, Firefox market share continues to hold steady at 22.47 percent, while Internet Explorer also treads water at 67.68 percent. Only Safari (4.07 percent) and Google Chrome (2.59 percent) show appreciable, sustained growth over the past few months.

Browser Market Share Data, July 2009

(Credit: Net Applications)

With Firefox recently surpassing its one-billionth download, we should see rising market share in the fall, unless back-to-school PC sales give IE a bump.

But I don't think IE will win over the student crowd, which is more likely to be a Mac (Safari) crowd than a Microsoft one. And so I suspect we'll continue to see Firefox (along with Safari and Chrome) rising against IE.

After all, eventually even the Griswalds come home and get back to work. When they do, more and more will be using Firefox.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

It's a good thing that Mozilla is profitable, because the open-source foundation would likely struggle to get venture funding.

For any Sand Hill venture capitalist, Mozilla fails to tick any of the correct boxes. While it does have a world-class development organization, Mozilla also relies on an external, unpaid workforce to contribute up to 40 percent of its code. Also, 88 percent of its revenues come from one source, Google, which also happens to be a competitor.

Speaking of competitors, it has three big ones--gargantuan ones. Google, Microsoft, and Apple. Tell a VC that you want to go up against one of these and you're likely to be turned away. Tell them you want to take on all three and, well, they might just make a full-on sprint for the safety of their Aston Martins.

And yet, Mozilla may be superbly positioned to compete with these big competitors precisely because it isn't anything like them: at its core, Mozilla is a nonprofit foundation that wants to save the world more than it wants to make a buck.

The New York Times highlights Mozilla's challenges in a searching review, but it falls just short of highlighting the fact that Mozilla's success derives from its unique mission, which encourages broad development and adoption, and is a direct byproduct of its nonprofit structure.

Because it is a nonprofit, Mozilla can lobby governments differently, and it has. Because it is a nonprofit, Mozilla can focus on delivering an unparalleled user experience, not on figuring out how to monetize the Web, hardware, etc.

Because it is a nonprofit, Mozilla can be truly disruptive in a way that its competitors cannot.

I'm sure there's not a day that goes by that John Lilly, Mitchell Baker, and the other Mozilla executives and employees don't wish that they had the resources their biggest competitors do. I'm equally sure there's not a day that goes by that they don't benefit from the decisions their resource constraints force upon them.

Firefox is as good as it is because of all that Mozilla has...and has not.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Microsoft may be its own toughest competitor. As noted by Mozilla's Asa Dotzler, Microsoft's new Internet Explorer 8 browser is taking the browser market by storm...so long as you define "browser market" as "Internet Explorer 7." Mozilla's Firefox 3.5 browser, at 30 million downloads and counting, isn't being affected by IE 8's uptake. But then, neither is IE 6.

It's only IE 7 that is getting squeezed by IE 8. And you thought they were friends...

Here's the data on IE market share:

(Credit: Asa Dotzler (Data from Net Applications))

This suggests that Firefox, with roughly 22 percent of browser market share, is the second-most widely used browser on the planet. Not bad when you consider the previous state of affairs when Firefox 1.0 was launched, as Dotzler does:

Back then IE 6 was the most popular browser with almost 85% of Web usage followed by older IE versions accounting for another 10 points of share, and with all other vendors' browsers accounting for only 5% of usage.

In other words, we have real competition again, competition that sees an open-source upstart seriously challenge Microsoft for first place in browser usage. Mozilla has accomplished this by making Firefox easy to use, easy to contribute to (which keeps getting easier, as Glyn Moody reports), and powerful through a large and growing community.

Importantly, Mozilla has had to fight for every user. Unlike IE, Firefox isn't pre-installed with Windows. That "30 million" number I cited above? That's not even due to an auto-update feature, which Mozilla has yet to turn on. Once that happens, Firefox 3.5's impressive download numbers should soar.

Perhaps Microsoft should stop competing with itself and start competing with Firefox...?

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Despite the rise of open source within the federal government, Mozilla's Firefox has yet to gain an official nod from the Department of State, at least according to a recent question-and-answer session that Secretary Hillary Clinton and Under Secretary Patrick Kennedy hosted last week, with an ironic back-and-forth on Firefox kicked off by government employee Jim Finkle:

Finkle: Can you please let the staff use an alternative Web browser called Firefox? I just--(applause)--I just moved to the State Department from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and was surprised that State doesn't use this browser. It was approved for the entire intelligence community, so I don't understand why State can't use it. It's a much safer program. Thank you. (Applause.)

Clinton: Well, apparently, there's a lot of support for this suggestion. (Laughter.) I don't know the answer. Pat, do you know the answer? (Laughter.)

Kennedy: The answer is, at the moment, it's an expense question. We can --

Finkle: It's free. (Laughter.)

Kennedy: Nothing is free. (Laughter.) It's a question of the resources to manage multiple systems. It is something we're looking at. And thanks to the secretary, there is a significant increase in the 2010 budget request that's pending for what is called the Capital Investment Fund, by which we fund our information technology operations. With the secretary's continuing pushing, we're hoping to get that increase in the Capital Investment Fund. And with those additional resources, we will be able to add multiple programs to it.

Yes, you're correct; it's free, but it has to be administered, the patches have to be loaded. It may seem small, but when you're running a worldwide operation and trying to push, as the secretary rightly said, out fobs and other devices, you're caught in the terrible bind of triage of trying to get the most out that you can, but knowing you can't do everything at once.

Under Secretary Kennedy makes a good point: deploying Firefox isn't free, in terms of administration. But then, nothing is, including Internet Explorer. The real question is whether Firefox is easier and more cost-effective to support than IE. Mozilla has made some recent moves to make it such. We'll see if the government is listening.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer's market share is absolutely falling. The question is, by how much?

I've reported before that Internet Explorer (IE) drops 5 percent market share points each year, while Mozilla Firefox gains 5 percentage points per year. But what is becoming increasingly clear is that IE's market share may be dropping more precipitously than previously reported, falling to 60 percent share in June 2009 instead of the 68 percent share expected.

Or is it?

The answer may depend on the source of the information, and the reliability of its data. Mozilla's Asa Dotzler uses StatCounter data to discern a 60 percent share for IE but, as ZDNet's Larry Dignan points out, this data may not hold up.

For Microsoft's sake, it had better hope not, as this chart compiled by Dotzler shows:

Internet Explorer market share falling faster than reported?

(Credit: Asa Dotzler (Data from StatCounter))

That's not the sort of chart with which Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer likes to sweeten his coffee in the morning.

Net Applications, the other big source of browser market share data, still hasn't posted its results for June 2009, noting that it is trying to make sense of "some significant variations in browser and operating system statistics."

Given that market share data isn't a one-month phenomenon, it's not necessarily helpful to celebrate or fret over the June data, especially since much of the market share share data is going to get skewed in the summer months, anyway. For example, given Firefox's disproportionately large following in Europe, coupled with Europe's disproportionately long holiday season in the summer, I'd expect to see Firefox drop some percentage points against IE through August, only to rebound strongly in September.

Regardless of short-term variations, one thing seems clear: Firefox is gaining on IE. Microsoft spent too long enjoying its browser dominance, and not enough time innovating. It's starting to pump R&D dollars into IE again, but it's not yet clear whether its monolithic approach to browser development can compete in the long term with Mozilla's community-developed Firefox.

Microsoft needs to compete again, or risks seeing even StatCounter's data understate just how quickly it's falling.

Mozilla, for its part, faces a host of new challenges. It can't afford to waste much time with back slaps and high-fives. The browser has become the center of computing. Microsoft isn't going to give up easily, nor will Google or Apple.

Game on.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

As I type this, Firefox 3.5 is blazing past 5.6 million downloads, having been released just a day and a half ago. While such uptake for Mozilla's upgraded browser is impressive, the bigger story is how Firefox 3.5 is upgrading the Web with its extensive support for HTML 5. Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) 8 has brought the company's browser back into the 21st century, but its sluggish (and perhaps perverse) response to emerging Web standards threatens to leave it in Web 1.0 Blunderland.

ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley wonders if the departure of Bill Gates has taken some of the bite out of Microsoft, and she may be on to something. Regardless, Microsoft needs to quickly execute to outflank Firefox or it threatens to let Mozilla, not Microsoft, define the Web, as Slate implies:

The best thing about the new Firefox is that it gives us a peek at the Internet of tomorrow...Firefox 3.5 offers the best implementation of the (HTML 5) standard--and because it's the second-most-popular Web browser in the world, the new release is sure to prompt Web designers to create pages tailored to the Web's new language. In other words, Firefox isn't just an upgrade for your computer; it could well prompt a re-engineering of the Web itself.

But it's not just HTML 5. Firefox is innovating in a number of other areas, including "location-aware browsing" on the "desktop," while Mozilla's Weave is experimenting with new ways to enrich identity in the browser. In tandem, Mozilla's team is also actively working on improving the online video experience.

And that's just this week.

It took Microsoft two-and-a-half years to move from IE7 to IE8, while five years passed before the company updated IE6 with IE7. The company seems to be moving faster on browser development now, but is it fast enough to keep up with Mozilla, not to mention Apple (Safari) and Google (Chrome)?

It won't be enough for Microsoft to borrow features from Mozilla's Firefox. Microsoft needs to innovate again, and not simply in its marketing department.

Also, it would be nice if IE were available for more than Windows. Mozilla is available on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, and it doesn't seem to slow its development pace down. Perhaps Microsoft should stop trying to protect Windows at the expense of losing the Web?

Of course, Mozilla, too, faces a host of competitive issues, as CNET describes. But Mozilla has never been shy about innovating. It exists to improve the Web, and understands that a competitive browser market does that...even if Firefox sometimes has to play catch up.

For today, however, the field is Mozilla's to lose.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Steve Ballmer needs to brush up on Roman history. Otherwise he seems doomed to repeat it, as two recent Microsoft campaigns suggest.

Microsoft has been dominant for so long that it has grown soft. As Edward Gibbon wrote in his exceptional "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," it is not outside enemies that crushed Rome so much as its own effete greatness:

The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.

Two new Microsoft directives suggest that the writing is on the wall for the once-great company. And this isn't even to mention Microsoft's tactics to squash Linux's growth in the Netbook market.

First, Microsoft has kicked off a "Get the Facts" browser campaign that is long on hyperbole and short on facts. Reading Microsoft's browser comparison chart, one would think that using Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome is a fast track to leprosy: IE apparently dominates in security, privacy, ease of use, healing the sick, and causing the lame to walk.

Speaking of "lame," IBM's Savio Rodrigues warns us to not be fooled by comparison tables that dramatically favor one product over others. Internet Explorer has gotten better over the years (It only had one way to go), but Microsoft's claims aren't even credible when it skews the results so dramatically in its favor.

Mozilla's own marketing for Firefox is very, very different.

Not content to let false advertising do the trick, Microsoft has also resorted to paying people to use its browser and calling users "idiots" if they opted to try something else. As TechCrunch reports, Microsoft has backed down from the ad hominem attacks, but the company is starting to look desperate.

(In need of charity itself, Microsoft is contributing to charities for every download of IE8. Awww....)

As if this browser desperation weren't enough, Microsoft has kicked off a second initiative that reveals just how unloved its "innovation" has become. Microsoft has confirmed its 18-month Windows 7 to XP downgrade policy.

There are very good reasons for software vendors to prod customers into staying current with software releases, but it is amazing just how hard Microsoft has had to work to convince Windows customers to leave XP. Apple and Linux customers seem to upgrade to their latest and greatest operating systems, while Microsoft customers seem to be pining for the good ol' Windows days.

It's one thing to have an upgrade policy. Having to articulate a downgrade policy is a signal of Microsoft defeat, not victory.

Gibbon wrote that "instead of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long." I feel the same way about Microsoft. It has done so much for the software industry--some very negative, much very positive--but it seems to have lost the plot. It is telling when the company's best product in years is the XBox, a hardware platform, as Bob Rosenberg noted to me over email.

Microsoft is a victim of its own desktop success, a fact that Google is using against it. Unless Microsoft can break out of its downward spiral of negative advertising born of stifled innovation in its products, it will fall. Sort of like Rome. Because of immoderate greatness.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.