TechWeb have an interesting article about the growth of Firefox and how the growth that was initially thought to be a temporary has in fact turned out to be quite consistent. Worth a read.
The recently disclosed Firefox flaws had many thinking that perhaps the browser security issue isn’t as clear cut as initially thought. One thing is clear though. In less then a week after the flaws were disclosed, the Mozilla foundation have already patched the flaws and released version 1.0.4 that addresses the newly disclosed flaws. This should put to rest the argument that Open Source applications like Firefox are not patched as quickly as their proprietary versions.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not a Firefox zealot who holds all other browsers in disdain, I actually don’t mind Opera, and Safari seems very nice also. My main reasons for focusing on Firefox is that it is an open community who makes a standards compliant browser with the best security features they know how to add. I don’t believe that you should need a specific companies browser (and thereby their Operating System) to consistently browse the web. I also believe that there should be a good cross platform browser at no cost. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for the likes of Opera, but you should not have to pay for basic web browsing. If you buy Opera, you should do so because you like one of the features it has that the others don’t. Internet Explorer is a good example of one companies efforts to make the Internet reliant on the products of that one company. Luckily the tactic backfired and they are being forced to re-address the issue. It was a close thing though. If Firefox hadn’t came out and taken a large chunk of IE’s market share, we may have seen less W3C standards compliance in IE7 rather than more. So the Internet remains (for now at least) a free and open set of standards that do not rely on any one company to prosper. Just as it should be.
