Red Hat coder moving to Mozilla

I'm a week late with this, but in case others also didn't notice, Christopher Blizzard, who has been a prominent programmer for Red Hat for nine years, has left to take a new job with Mozilla. He announced the move on his blog.

Mozilla backs the development of both the Firefox Web browser and the Thunderbird e-mail client.

(Credit: Mozilla)

"Starting in mid-November I will be joining the evangelism team at Mozilla Corp....to help tell the story of the Open Web. My role will be to work with other open-source projects that are well aligned with Mozilla's mission and help them take part in writing that story," he said on his blog.

The Mozilla Foundation, fueled by revenue from a Google deal, is in a growth spurt right now. Its Mozilla Corp. subsidiary develops the Firefox Web browser, which has won significant market share from Microsoft's dominant Internet Explorer. The Mozilla Foundation also funds development of the new Prism software for turning Web software into desktop software, , the Sunbird calendar software, and the Lightning plug-in for endowing Thunderbird with calendar abilities, and various other open-source projects.

Blizzard has been active in projects including Fedora, Red Hat's free and fast-moving Linux product, and the One Laptop Per Child effort.

[JasonCe]

I am sorry, but which "significant market share"?

After more than 5 years, Firefox still has less than 15% marketshare. Before Firefox, Navigator had around 10%, they basically inherited that.

So how is this a "significant market share" win? Seriously. And no open source zealots, please.

This is just one of browser market share reports, and one that gives Firefox the largest share, I shall add:
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0&qpmr=15&qpdt=1&qpct=3&qptimeframe=M&qpsp=104

Go check Wikipedia for a full list of share reports:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

I am sorry, but I don't see a "significant win". Whether you like it or not, IE still rules the browser world.

[ethana2]

If you figure in IQ,

then it looks a lot better.

...and don't assume all those IE hits are really IE. I spoof it so sites won't discriminate against me.

[FishB8]

How to define significant

Market share varies when you start slicing up the demographics. For instance:

- Market share in Europe is much bigger for FF than in the US. (Or at least that's what I've read)

- Market share among web developers and the computer literate is higher for FF than it's share among clueless boobs who find it challenging to work their way through the windows start menu.

-Market share for IE among OS users outside of windows is virtually nil.

So, basically "significant market share" is to be defined as enough share that MS is forced to pull it's head out of the sand and actually develop an improved version of IE that adheres closer to the standards AND where web developers start to make sure their web sites work with browsers based off of Gecko and WebKit instead of just IE.

[Shankland]

oh, it's significant share, all right

Certainly Firefox hasn't dethroned IE, but it's widely used enough that folks who develop Web sites test to make sure their sites work with it. And its success forced Microsoft to go light a fire under its previously complacent IE developers.