The Open Road

If you're a Mac user with a need for speed, you'll struggle to find a better browser than Mozilla's Camino. Apple's Safari will win a drag race, but it lacks the customizability that comes with an open-source browser like Camino. Unfortunately, both Safari and Camino fall incredibly short against Firefox because both are heavy on speed and light on community.

For those who want a highly optimized, lightning fast browsing experience on the Mac, you can't do much better than Camino, as TechCrunch writes. But most of us want more than that. We want Adblock Plus to filter out ads from our browsing experience. We want Bitly Preview to be able to launch and track tweets from the browser. And more.

Sure, you can "PimpMyCamino," but you won't get nearly the level of detailing that comes with Firefox's impressive community. It's not hard, technically, to migrate from Firefox to Camino, but in the move you're going to end up losing most of the add-ons that make Firefox so powerful.

Camino has ad-blocking functionality built into the browser, and you can find an array of themes to dress it up. But really, the primary reason to use Camino is if you want raw speed. But if that's all you want, Safari is likely a better choice, given the somewhat limited customizations and add-ons available for Camino. Or Google Chrome, which hasn't fully launched on the Mac yet but promises a big speed boost once it does.

Browsing is about more than speed. Firefox delivers a global community with a diverse array of needs and solutions, which is why it remains my preferred browser, even as Camino sprints by, unadorned.

It was announced Monday that smartphone maker Research in Motion had acquired Torch Mobile, a provider of browsers and other applications based on the open-source WebKit project. Though Webkit has become the unofficial standard for mobile browsers, as Don Reisinger reports, it seems to be a largely Apple-controlled open-source community, one that has the potential to leave RIM, Palm, Google, and other WebKit users constantly playing catch-up to Apple.

Is WebKit open source? Absolutely. But is it truly an open, level playing field for RIM and other would-be competitors to Apple? Likely not.

Yes, there are other developers from Nokia, Torch Mobile, and Google involved with the project, but Apple controls the project, if by no other means than sheer numbers. Apple employs the majority of WebKit developers (30), with Google coming in second (19). Torch Mobile? It employs just eight of the WebKit development team members.

More pertinently, Apple employs far more of the WebKit reviewers than anyone else, which gives it much more control. Most of the other participants are committers, which are important but not equal in control to reviewers.

I've even heard that WebKit is not accepting outside contributions at present, though I have not yet been able to verify this.

Not that you need to look too deeply to see Apple's grip on the project. Just look at the logo:

WebKit logo

Look familiar? It should. Here's Apple's logo for its Safari browser, which is based on the WebKit project:

Safari logo

Coincidence? Um...no. After all, the WebKit blog is called (get this): "Surfin' Safari. Think the blog is going to change its name anytime soon to "Surfin' RIM"? Don't hold your breath.

As the proud owner of four MacBook Pros and three iPhones, I'm not bashing Apple. I love what it produces.

But if part of RIM's interest in Torch Mobile was influence in the WebKit project, it could have saved its money. WebKit, for better or worse, is largely an Apple project, with serious support from Google. For everyone else, WebKit may be the best game in town, but it's Apple's town. It almost certainly will result in a better Blackberry browser for RIM customers, but not one that RIM has as much control over as it would like.

There are some technologies that make less and less sense as proprietary software. The browser is one of them. With Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome actively gaining at Internet Explorer's expense on the "desktop," it would be nice to see a truly open-source project--open in source, and open to outside involvement--standardize the mobile browsing experience, too.

There's Mozilla's Fennec, of course, but its development has been slow. WebKit may be the best option for RIM and others, but it would be an even better option if Apple took its hands off the wheel to open up the project further.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

Mozilla just released Weave Sync 0.4.0, but the reality is that it will take a long time before we need a 1.0 of Weave. Weave Sync coordinates your Firefox bookmarks, browser history, saved passwords, and tabs across your various Firefox installations: desktop, laptop, Netbook, and mobile.

The problem with this vision is that today it's largely unnecessary. For a variety of reasons (some very good, some not so good), Mozilla's mobile Firefox--codenamed "Fennec"--runs on Windows Mobile (version 6 and up) devices...and that's it.

While some new moves from Google may see Fennec port its way to the Android platform, this is a drop in the global browsing bucket, and doesn't even address the fact that there are other mobile browsers with much more momentum, as ReadWriteWeb notes.

Compounding this problem, it's unclear that most people want to sync between different computing devices. More and more people have gravitated to laptops or other mobile computing devices, using these as their primary computing device, rather than as an adjunct, under-powered alternative when away from the desktop.

Personally, I can even remember the last time that I thought about using a desktop computer.

Yes, I have four Macs sitting around the house, but each one is tied to a different family member. I don't really want my son's Webkinz bookmark on my Firefox browser any more than my wife wants to look past my NewsNow Arsenal news feed.

In short, Weave seems to be solving a difficult, but not important, problem. At least, not as currently envisaged.

I'd find Weave far more compelling if it acted as a Web service that let me take my full Firefox experience with me to devices that I don't own. For example, I occasionally find myself using the desktop computers in a hotel lobby, and would love a secure way to log in, claim that browsing experience as my own, and have all traces of myself obliterated for the next patron.

That would be a useful way to "Weave" together my different Firefox sessions: between computers I own and don't own, rather than just between computers I own.

How about it, Mozilla?

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay,.

Since the unveiling its own browser, Google's continued support of Firefox has been somewhat puzzling. But to the world's dominant Web search provider, helping increase the amount of Web use ultimately means more Google searches.

Google has been a good partner to Mozilla over the years, pumping tens of millions of dollars into the open-source foundation that have helped make Firefox arguably the best browser in the world.

More recently with the launch of its open-source Chrome browser, however, Google became both partner and competitor to Mozilla. Given the potential to hurt Firefox adoption, it's interesting to note Google's calculus for introducing Chrome, as detailed in a recent O'Reilly Radar interview with Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience:

We think that, overall, if you make the Web better, people use the Web more. And that ultimately benefits Google because we believe that search is a certain and rather fixed percentage of people's online activities each day. It's hovered right around 5 percent from the very beginning of the Internet...If that's true, one way we can grow search is by gaining market share from other competitors. The other way we can gain share is by just growing the market overall, where we don't necessarily gain share but we gain on overall volume.

So we have a number of things that we do that try and make the Web more pleasant and easy to use...As we looked at the browser market, people have gotten really good at rendering HTML. But there hasn't been a lot of innovation. And there's been almost no attention on JavaScript at all. And so we thought we could build a browser that is just a lot faster for the Web, and it's much more optimized for JavaScript.

As Mayer further details, Google doesn't expect to be the source of all browser innovation. It wants to continue working with Firefox, for example, helping prod the market forward.

As Mozilla CEO John Lilly has said, increased competition in the browser market can spark innovation. Competition isn't comfortable, but because it pushes vendors to do their best work and "often results in innovation of one sort or another," it's ultimately good for customers and competitors.

This is why we should be cheering Google's entry into the browser market--even if we ultimately want Firefox to win. Perhaps especially if we want Firefox to win.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay