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Internet Explorer Versus FireFox: The Clash Of Titans, 2.5
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25-Dec-2008
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Considering the fact that every single user of the Internet pays a grant total of $0.00 for whatever Web browser they so choose, you would think that the competition in this market would be minimal, if existent at all. That, as is all too often true in instances where it makes absolutely no sense, is not the case. There is a surprisingly fierce rivalry and competition in the browser market, with the current key players being Microsoft's Internet Explorer, that program you get with Windows anyway and have probably used since 1999, and the other key player is Mozilla's FireFox, the successor to Netscape's mantle of competing with Microsoft.
Now, the first question you have to ask (and I already did), is if it generates a big goose egg, what is the point? The answer is fear. And to understand that, you have to have a history lesson.
In 1994, around the birth of the Internet as we know it, there was one company leading the charge of e-everything, and that of course was...Netscape. Yeah, Microsoft really didn't start it, it just perfected it – or at least that is what everyone (the majority) has agreed upon. Jim Clark, not the greatest man in the history of computing, but definitely one of the top 5, left a very bitter situation at Silicon Graphics, a company most of you have probably never heard of, and for good reason, and went off on the venture of creating the modern 'browsable' Internet that we all know today. And he succeeded. As is true, however, with so many people throughout history, pride commeth before the fall. And boy did the fall commeth.
Microsoft might have been content to leave Netscape alone, after all, it was their flagship Windows 95 that made Netscape work, right? Microsoft was the one making the money, right? Very true, indeed. Except one of the top guys at Netscape, a guy named Marc Andreessen, decided somebody had to point out that the emperor had no clothes. And boy was the emperor pissed. Microsoft declared a crusade in all shapes and forms to destroy Netscape. And they literally did just that.
Microsoft ensured that Internet Explorer, only, was packaged with its Windows operating system when computers left the factories – and supposedly threatened to drop manufacturers off its' list of vendors if anyone broke ranks. Nobody broke ranks, and while Netscape still had any net worth (which at one time was ridiculously substantial, especially considering it had a product that sold for nothing), Jim Clark and the Netscape boys managed to partner with AOL – which managed to partner with Time Warner, that created a company that...really was a bad idea and Time Warner has probably regretted every minute of the deal thus far. In the end, Internet Explorer won the day, Bill Gates lost to the Department of Justice (but Microsoft survived, exceptionally well), and Jim Clark was on to his new, new thing (which is a great book, and should be required reading for anyone in the IT field), and the story was over, right? Wrong.
There still stood many unanswered questions as to why Microsoft went berserk in its jihad against Netscape. The answer finally came in 2003; the advent of Visual Basic, .Net. No longer just making the browser that displayed the pages and provided the functionality, Microsoft now sought to dominate the infrastructure of the Internet by controlling and defining the very code that would become the fabric of the Web. Netscape had predicted that Web Based Applications would make computing, as it is even still done today, a thing of the past, and Microsoft agreed. Wisely, Bill Gates positioned Microsoft to take key advantage of this next phase in computing and the Internet, and he largely succeeded.
So why is there a FireFox? The answer for at least the near future is PHP, which is about the only contender with VB .NET. Although, given the scalability of Microsoft applications, I personally don't foresee a 'triumph' for FireFox/PHP without something very drastic happening. I think Microsoft is wise to maintain a low wake, in wake of its repeated domestic and international justice department issues, and this perhaps more so than anything is allowing the alternatives to proliferate as much as they do.
The only question left, is that now that the emperor has clothes, what exactly is he going to do? I think Microsoft will maintain its low exposure and continue to compete and, truthfully, keep pumping out a superior product – and making money in the process. FireFox and PHP (which is not exclusively Open Source, but considerably so) simply don't generate the revenue to maintain genuine competition. Google, on the other hand, does, and that is another article...for another day. |
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