A (very) small threat from firefox

According to WebSideStory, a web analytics company, suggesting firefox has attracted more user than ever, pushing IE’s market share well below 90%. Still, its loading speed really irritates me and needless to say its memory footprint (more than 100MB). It’s big enough to contain a programming language called XUL and a fully customized look-and-feel widgets system so you can create your plug-ins and beautiful themes. While some of the slashdotters pointed out that firefox’s success could be dexterously vanished, plug-ins and themes for IE isn’t difficult to implement, actually some people have done it without any difficulty. If you choose to use IE, you’ll get ActiveX, which is unique in industry and constantly associates with adware/spyware so until Microsoft knocks it off (very likely I think when Longhorn is out) firefox will continue to gain popularity. I’m not a technical expert on this matter but what they could do is replaced it with .NET framework (ActiveX is a pre-.NET product).

Without doubt, Bill Gates is aware of the issue, however, he claims that he’s not unhappy with the situation at the moment and does not fear the rise of firefox. The recent CES tells you that Microsoft is making a bet on the consumer electronics like XBOX2 and Media Center 2005, and they are also busy with pre-longhorn schedule and .NET 2.0 release. Clearly, if you see it like I do, they’ve tons of work to deal with. Back to the browser war in the 1990s, Microsoft was rushing for its first browser release, Internet Explorer, since they saw it as a devastating threat from Netscape. It is an entirely different story in 2005, browser is still a browser, HTML is still being used, and most importantly firefox runs on “their” windows platform. “You” still use their OS and its impact is certainly less than what Linux does, therefore, the threat isn’t imminent.

While the adoption of firefox in general public is still growing slow (my opinion), it seems that most of the average computer users are quite happy (or accept) with all the troubles with IE.