I was amused last night poking around de.lico.us looking at social bookmarking, when I noticed that a number of these new web 2.0 sites support Firefox over Internet Explorer for tool bar and extension support. It then struck me the reason that they do that is based in statistics for the Digg site. 65% of users have Firefox as their default browser. The new web 2.0 sites, Digg, Technorati, del.icio.us, blogpulse, etc are responding to their users, and those users have Firefox. Then I notice the numbers I posted on a previous blog this week frankly surprised me, which is why I posted it quickly, and then only now have time to reflect on it. Over on W3C they are finding a simlar trend, they have put Firefox use at 26% of their sample. I am not sure how it skews, but it is another indication of the trend. You can find it here.

Germany, Italy and Australia have no more aversion to Microsoft that anyone else (or anybody else for that matter). It is difficult to surmise what is behind Germany’s wholesale adoption of Firefox but there is a strong Open Source Community in Germany, but so to in the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden (they have Opera) as well, and the rank similar to the overall Worldwide use.

The success of Firefox is contained in two areas. Firstly it is a failure of Microsoft to maintain it’s own browser and secondly it is the success of a dedicated team with a completely different business model to the old Netscape where they are not reliant on selling the software itself.

The Internet Explorer browser was for the most of the last 10 years the cornerstone of a battle to make sure that the browser did not become the API stack of the 21st Century. Microsoft in the 90s spent a tremendous amount of time and energy to make sure that Netscape did not succeed in their quest to build a successful browser. Once it achieved that status, it when into a state of atrophy for the next 5 years, and will not come out of that until later this year. It is interesting to note that originally Microsoft was not going to update IE until Vista (nee Longhorn). They were forced to back down because of a number of serious and embarrassing security problems, and the fact that Firefox was making their marketing lives difficult.

According to Microsoft’s own site IE 6 was released in 2001, which is obviously 5 years ago. I can understand that this is not a revenue product for them, indeed it is a “free” part of Windows and they cannot charge for it separately, but it is the most used application on a Desktop, even before Outlook or the other Office Products. It would make sense for a dedicated browser company would want to keep updating and improving the product.

On a side note, the purpose of Internet Explorer and it’s importance to Microsoft was not only because of the need to make sure that Netscape did not get between it and the user, but Microsoft was going to try and tie the Browser and the Web server together. If they could dominate the Desktop browser, they could then move the HTML (etc) standards towards the Internet Information Server (IIS) and drive other webservers out of the market, and of course IIS only runs on Windows Servers. A small foundation called Apache put paid to that idea. This is of course now consigned to history. This attempt to tie the Webserver and Browser together resulted in ActiveX controls, probably one of the worst ideas ever to come out of corporate computing. Thankfully this is being replaced by AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) interfaces (such as the new Zimbra Server we moved to this week).

Microsoft as a software company has an enormous number of projects and products to manage. It’s over riding ethos is the perpetuation of the core Office and Windows OS products. This is where all of their profit comes from. The browser will only come into prominence once if and when the browser becomes important again. I would not underestimate that thought because the next battle for the user is in the Network APIs (read Google et al), and an important part of that battle will be browser support.

Firefox and indeed the Mozilla Foundation has a bright future. The Foundation is advertising supported and profitable. Mozilla makes it’s money off the search function, the bulk is from Google who pays for that feature in Firefox. Apparently they made over $70M in search fees last year. It is able to set it’s sights on new features and functionality specifically around making the Internet User’s experience cleaner and more intuitive. It has a cadre of powerful supports including Google. Firefox, unlike Microsoft has a large team dedicated to a cross platform browser in order to make the Internet an open and flexible environment through the use of open standards. We look forward to more innovation on the browser front from Firefox and Mozilla as they extend their product into new areas.

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