Was Mozilla Worth The Wait? (TechWeb)
No matter how good Mozilla is, it's not likely to be able to make up for years of lost time."
Posted Jun 18, 2002 20:04 UTC (Tue)
by mattdm (subscriber, #18)
[Link] (3 responses)
In fact, the line is an answer to the rhetorical question "But will people with a choice make the switch?", and is preceeded by "Conventional wisdom says no. Users may want freedom of choice, but few actually exercise it." In other words, it's saying: "Conventional wisdom says it doesn't matter how good Mozilla is -- IE (and Opera) are too entrenched."
Posted Jun 18, 2002 20:12 UTC (Tue)
by dave (guest, #7)
[Link]
In my opinion, that is not how the browser battle will be won. It will be won by producing a superior, open, and standards-based browser, and the industry will follow. AOL is demonstrating this already by testing Gecko with AOL 7's beta, and soon AOLers will be using Gecko by default. The consumer will benefit, and they probably won't even realize what happened. Other companies will follow, producing their own highly customized browsers for their customers, from standard desktop software to small embedded devices. Conventional wisdom says that strong and open protocols win out in the end. I probably shouldn't have been so hard on the author, but I see these anti-Mozilla sentiments as evidence that the writer is uneducated, misinformed, and they are counter-productive to a better world wide web. Dave
Posted Jun 19, 2002 2:31 UTC (Wed)
by Baylink (guest, #755)
[Link] (1 responses)
AOL may be another third. The last third is corporate desktops, those things under the command of an IT department somewhere. While convincing those IT managements that Linux on the desktop is a Good Thing is not an easy battle (yet; OPfWDaPPoS), I don't think that it will be *nearly* as big a job to convince them that switching to a more standards compliant, more tractable... and more *secure* browser would be a Good Thing. And you tend to get 5, 10, sometimes 20 or 30 thousand seats at a time in circumstances like that. Ask Ford Europe. Or Sherwin Williams. Or the German government. Or Peru. Not All Of The Internet Is Under Microsoft's Thumb. Imagine if the US Federal Government banned MS... (and that's not *NEARLY* as far fetched as it was, maybe, 2 years ago...)
Posted Jun 20, 2002 9:42 UTC (Thu)
by sam (guest, #1329)
[Link]
I despise acronyms like this; people use them on Usenet to form cliques. - Sam
Posted Jun 18, 2002 20:05 UTC (Tue)
by AnswerGuy (guest, #1256)
[Link]
It is unlikely that Mozilla will gain back much marketshare on MS Certainly it is likely that Linux will become the dominant desktop So, Mozilla lost market share during it's torturous development process. It's also easy to forget that Mozilla is now more than just a web browser. Of course these are likely to start as "in house" vertical applications Mozilla as "just a web browser" isn't compelling for the majority of
Posted Jun 19, 2002 9:25 UTC (Wed)
by DeletedUser936 ((unknown), #936)
[Link]
It wasn't so impossible for IE to win marketshare from Netscape. And although plenty of that marketshare consisted of new users, almost all netscape users switched to IE. Even I used IE for a while, before I used mozilla and went to linux. Why did they switch? IE was in windows, IE was free, and IE was better. Mozilla will never be in windows, but it's also free and it can be better. In fact, I think it's already better. That's one of the reasons why I use it. However, it's not good enough to get people to switch yet, because it wouldn't know usability if it tripped over it and fell. That'll change. Even gnome's usability is becoming great in version 2.0 they say, so anything's possible. And the cool thing about mozilla is: it doesn't have to conquer the market to win over the market. It's only goal is to produce a standards-compliant browser and development platform, not to start a war with MS, or to make money. If it can get 15 percent of the market, it wins, because then people will have to take it into account when building websites, and nobody will be able to shove the standards aside.
Your quote is out of context and isn't quite fair to the author. By itself, the quote seems to say "I don't care how good Mozilla is -- I'm not even going to bother looking; too bad and too late."your quote isn't quite fair
At the same time, however, the writer of this article displays a very clear misunderstanding of the value of Mozilla. He works on the premise that people would go out and download Mozilla or Netscape and make the switch from Internet Explorer.your quote isn't quite fair
I concur with Dave's appraisal. Yes, the inertia of the home & home office is pretty large. But they're only about, maybe, 1/3 the market.Where is the market?
What do you mean by OPfWDaPPoS?Where is the market?
As I said in one of my other comments; Mozilla has taken a long time.Not Worth the download, but they are right
While it was worth the wait for me, Netscape has lost a lot of
marketshare during its long hiatus from significant releases.
Windows or under MacOS. Of course it might gain marketshare on the
coat-tails of Linux' charge towards the desktop. In that sense
Mozilla further enables a viable Linux desktop (along with
OpenOffice.org, Abiword, Evolution, Gnumeric, the GIMP, etc).
in Asia and in the 3rd world and possibly in European government
agencies, within the next two to five years. Walmart selling
cheap Lindows boxes may also increase the marketshare in the U.S.
Meanwhile some U.S. public schools are feeling the pinch (not just
from the direct software licensing, but from increased costs in
*auditing* to prove that they have paid for the software that they're
using and from BSA fines from discrepencies and accounting oversights;
the human factors, a feeling of persecution by academic purchasing
agents, may contribute significantly to that trend as angry administrators
look for any plausible alternative).
We can't fault the Mozilla team; taking a big stinking pile of proprietary
code, with huge gouges of functionality ripped out of it (portions that
were licensed by Netscape from third parties and where NOT part of the
open source release back in '98) and turning that into a reasonably
robust, application with even a modicum of additional functionality is
a HUGE undertaking. My virtual hat is off to them all.
It's an application framework which can be customized by XUL programming,
extended with Java and JavaScript (and TCLets, etc). It would be
unreasonable to expect Mozilla to become the front end to your word
processor, spreadsheet, or other mainstream productivity application.
However, I can see where it may become the vehicle of choice for database
entry, forms and queryting applications. Just a little play with
Chatzilla is enough to show that the framework is flexible enough for
that. (ActiveState's Komodo RAD, rapid app. dev., tool is another example
of XUL programming in Mozilla).
at mid-sized corporations and government (particularly non-U.S.) agencies.
It remains to be seen if these applications "leak" into the public
web (as companies choose to provide limited access for extranet business
partners, and thence to truly public applications like online banking,
account management, etc.). Will Microsoft add XUL support to IE? Would
that protect their marketshare or promote the competition? (It's likely
that they'll try to force/sell their own proprietary framework/extensions
under the umbrella of .NET to fight Mozilla/XUL head-to-head. Of course
they aren't comparable in those terms --- but that's a likely approach
nonetheless).
MS IE or Opera users. Mozilla as a framework for new applications
might be.
You're all acting like it's impossible for mozilla to win back marketshare.Nothing's impossible