Toby's Ironman-In-Training Blog

I got a letter from someone at Mozilla.org today who saw my plug for the Firefox Web Browser and asked if I’d add a button for them to my website. I was happy to oblige, seeing as how I probably spend hours a day using their awesome, free product. (Hey Peter, you’d better add a Firefox button to your site, too.. you wouldn’t want people to be able to actually tell our pages apart! Ha!)

I also have gotten my wife to start using Firefox as well, and she seems to rather like it, which is proof positive that it’s not just a program for computer geeks!

Whether or not the “browser wars” become reignited as some have speculated, it is becoming obvious that the Mozilla Foundation and their free Firefox browser have gotten Microsoft’s attention. Microsoft seems to be backing away from their earlier stance that a new version of Internet Explorer will not be released until the next version of Windows comes out sometime a few years from now. The development manager of IE has even started a blog where he serves up a bunch of lame excuses as to why IE is such a horrible product.

They very well should be taking notice, seeing as how Mozilla browsers now account for almost 15% of web traffic. This is up from around 5% a year ago, and almost all of that gain is at Microsoft’s expense. People are simply fed up with Internet Explorer and its outdated interface, unwanted popup ads (battling these pop-up ads is often compared to those “whack-a-mole” carnival games), and horrible security record.

As the well-respected Netcraft website puts it, “This is an extremely dangerous situation for Microsoft. The phishing threats and the growing professional chorus of disapproval for Internet Explorer provide Windows users with very good reasons to turn elsewhere, even if only temporarily. But Firefox is so good that many will want to stay with it. And once they have tasted the power and freedom of open source, maybe they will be tempted to try ‘just one more program’.”