Revisitation of the Browser Wars?

The recent release of the latest incarnation of Mozilla – dubbed FireFox - is making quite a stir; the open source developer team even appeared on the cover of Wired this month, generating a buzz amongst geeks to the heralded Browser Wars of the ninties. It’s going to happen again, some say, as FireFox downloads ‘soar’, proving in some sense that Microsoft’s 93% domination of the browser market is somehow on shaky footing. “Bill Gates: watch your back!” is Wired’s tagline.

Well, I don’t buy it.

Everybody wants the nineties to return – who wouldn’t? Those were some great days in technology full of optimism, innovation, and enthusiasm. The browser – the act of browsing – was just being defined. Now we’re in a different age. An age that has already defined what a browser is and does, and the message is clear: to the consumer, a browser is purely a utilitarian applette; a virtual machine for our portals and distributed applications; the browser is a known quantity, consistent, familiar, with a UI just as predictable as a telephone. Does the average consumer want new widgets and innovation? No – the average consumer wants consistency.

That’s the way Microsoft must see it anyway as they’re still continuing to integrate XML/HTML features into the o/s so that the browser becomes ubiquitous, irrelevant. A native browser to Windows means that Windows is your browser. The need for a separate application – and all the compatibility issues that surround it – is an idea that consumer’s pooh-poohed with the demise of Netscape. Yet, here we are again.

The rage for FireFox seemingly ignores the other plausable alternatives – Opera, Hotbot, Netscape – good products that try to incorporate more sophisticated tools that the average consumer really doesn’t need, understand, or want. Opera is by far a superior browser to IE, and probably better than FireFox, but it’s UI is exceedingly complex – people don’t want complexity, they want simplicity. Only ubergeeks really wanted Hotbot or Opera, and the only folks that wanted to keep Netscape on their desktops did it to spite Microsoft…

I can only presume that the buzz around FireFox are the same geeks looking to get out their message of safety and security; a chuckle since Mozilla (aka FireFox) is open source – nothing better than knowing how the fortress is built to storm it. Yet, the only real reason why FireFox is more secure than IE is because it’s relatively new to the market; the bad guys need time to find its holes. And they’ll find the holes. And in comparison to Microsoft’s native electronic-distribution channel built into Windows, it’ll take the AOL-Funded Mozilla Foundation (coding by consensus) too long to respond to emerging threats to do corporate machines or end consumers any good.

I think the idealism is great but the hype is really wrong. FireFox isn’t safer, it’s just newer. FireFox isn’t better, it’s just a telephone, like any other telephone, just as good as the next telephone. FireFox isn’t competitive; it’s development process is slow and anarchistic. Does FireFox represent a return to the Browser Wars? I say no – FireFox is just the frenzied soldier trapped on an island who wasn’t told the war ended.

Russell Mickler, CISSP MCSE

Principal, Mickler & Associates

www.micklerandassociates.com

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