Internet Explorer is based on intellectual property rights and its source code is secret and cannot be modified by anyone outside of Microsoft. Because Firefox is open source it can take advantage of the wisdom of crowds in the developer community and thus pushing innovation. Firefox is being developed by the Mozilla Foundation which is an open source community of developers and testers. Here lies the big difference between Internet Explorer and Firefox. Worldwide Firefox now has a user share of 12,93% while in some European countries such as Germany 39,02% of the users (ZDnet) use Firefox! Firefox had about two years to build its own loyal user base and is now taking advantage of that.Īd. Ever since the introduction of the Firefox browser Internet Explorer has been losing ground. by introducing tabbed browsing, an integrated search engine and by better supporting the W3C-standards. There have been only minor updates on Internet Explorer for over two years while Firefox has been taking giant steps e.g. Firefox has been hailed as a huge improvement over Internet Explorer 6.0 which was released in the summer of 2004. Mozilla was born out of this source code and released their first Mozilla Firefox browser on November 9, 2004. Netscape lost the battle and decided in 1998 to publish the source code of their Netscape Navigator browser as an open source code. Netscape didn’t have this userbase and had to be downloaded from the Web which at the time (1997-1999) took a long time and being online was quite expensive back then. With this move Microsoft assured itself of an enormous userbase for their Internet Explorer browser. They illegally made use of their monopoly position/installed userbase by completely integrating Internet Explorer into the Windows operating system (installed on aprox. This asset allowed Microsoft to win the first browserwar. Shapiro and Varian also define seven assets a company should have to win such a standard war:Īd 1. ‘The Art of Standard Wars’ California Management Review. Standard wars -battles for market dominance between incompatible technologies- are a fixture of the information age. The browserwar is a type of standardization war which Shapiro and Varian define as: I discussed the several tactics that were used by Microsoft to push Netscape out of the market. In my Bachelor thesis (in Dutch) I gave a brief overview of the first browserwar between Netscape and Microsoft. Microsoft and Mozilla just released their new browsers: Internet Explorer 7 was released October 18 and Firefox 2 was on October 24. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror – from The Book of Mozilla, 7:151 (type about:mozilla in the address bar) The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced.
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