The war for Web browser market share is kicking into high gear.
“People in the industry foresee a time in which for many people, the only thing they'll need on a computer is a browser. The browser is just extraordinarily strategic,” said Mitch Kapor, the software pioneer and a director at the Mozilla Foundation, according to the NewsFactor Network.
A Web browser is a type of software that allows one to view information on the Internet. The most well known browsers are Microsoft Corporation’s Internet Explorer and Apple, Inc.’s Safari.
Mozilla, which holds a 28 percent market share, recently released the newest version of its open source browser, dubbed Firefox 3. Firefox was downloaded more than 8 million times on its first day of release.
Apple jumped ahead of its competition and released Safari 3.1 back in March, calling it “the world’s fastest web browser for Mac and Windows PCs.”
The next generation browser from Microsoft, Internet Explorer 8, is currently under development.
Role of Volunteers
Mozilla, founded by former Netscape employees, celebrates its 10-year anniversary for Firefox this year.
“Ten years ago a radical idea took shape. The idea was that an open-source community could create choice and innovation in key Internet technologies where large, commercial vendors could not. This idea took shape as the Mozilla project,” said Winifred Mitchell Baker, COE of the Mozilla Foundation on her Blog “Mitchell’s Blog.”
In 1998, the Firefox team started out with 12 people as a project group within Netscape Communications Corporation. In 2003, the team separated from Netscape and grew to 25 employees by 2006 and 120 by 2008. Those figures do not include scores of volunteers that helped the development of Firefox.
Firefox would slide into oblivion without the thousands of volunteers “who develop the code and distribute the browser” that contribute to its success, Baker said during a recent interview with McKinsey & Co.
”If you took away our employees, we’d be a good open-source project but nothing like a force on the Internet. If you took away the volunteers and everyone else, we would die,” said Baker.
Baker talked about Firefox’s 150 million users and its 50 language editions. Firefox users are disbursed throughout the world, with 29 percent in the United States, 13 percent in Germany and 6 percent in France.
The Cash Cow
A great majority of the volunteers identify with Mozilla’s scientific approach and goal-oriented strategy.
Anything but an autocrat, Baker believes in a participatory environment. “Our decision-making process is highly distributed and unrelated to employment status, and some of the people who make decisions about code are not employees,” Baker shared with McKinsey.
She admits that the Firefox success is attributed more to luck and being at the right time and the right place. But she suggests that the hard work and mental capacity of everyone involved in developing Firefox shouldn’t be discounted.
Mozilla, as a not-for-profit company, invests the millions of dollars it earns from the success of Firefox into a multitude of projects.
The last financial statements indicate revenues of almost $62 million in 2006. Close to $12 million were spent on software projects while another $7 million paid for other additional costs.
Mozilla gets a large chunk of its revenue from Google Inc., but there are others, including Yahoo!, that contribute to Mozilla’s fortunes.
Microsoft Worried
According to Matt Asay of CNet, Microsoft has reasons to be concerned.
Apparently, Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft Corporation, said that open-source is troublesome. He specifically used the term “disruptive” to describe the open-source industry.
“Without open source, they are arguably not nearly as viable as businesses because they would lose both flexibility and funding in and to their infrastructure,” according to Asay.
Open-source products do not require any start-up cost and are user friendly, as many of the end users are involved in open-source development.
“Microsoft’s biggest fear must be the Googles of the world: Companies that fund open-source development without the need to sell that software directly. Microsoft knows how to compete in selling software. It still has no clue how to use free software to create more free software, while offering proprietary service on top of that software. It still believes it has to build everything itself,” argues Asay in the article.
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