A CNet columnist, Molly Wood, totally misunderstands what Firefox, and open source software, are all about. She’s arguing that now that Microsoft has said it will issue an update of its browser, we can write Firefox off:
“For a moment there, it looked like the tyrant IE could actually be overthrown. Those were heady days, weren’t they? Well, they’re over now… If IE 7 is even 50 percent more secure than current versions, the Firefox rebellion is finished. If IE 7 has tabs, Firefox will be destroyed as surely as the Hungarian uprising of 1956 was crushed by the Soviets… now that the sleeping giant has awakened, I think the buzzing gnat of the browser wars is about to be squashed flat.”
This is a prime example of one of journalism’s worst habits — a knee-jerk application of “who wins, who loses?” logic to situations where it doesn’t really apply. “Finished.” “Destroyed.” “Crushed.” “Squashed flat.” This is the language of pro wrestling, sometimes adopted by business writers who are desperate to paint the typically colorless corporate world in the bright colors and action-packed imagery of sports.
Yet the whole point of the open-source challenge to Microsoft is that it can’t be “crushed” like a small commercial competitor. IE 7 may or may not cut into the extreme growth curve of Firefox adoption; but the people who are building the open-source browser will happily continue to fix their bugs and add their plugins and improve their product whether their adoption rate stalls out or not. And Firefox has already achieved critical mass in the market such that responsible Web site designers can no longer take the lazy “everyone uses IE” route.
Naturally, everybody wants their work to be appreciated and their products to be used, and I’m sure the Firefox team are going to pay close attention to Microsoft’s competition — but I can’t imagine them sweating the way the employees of a commercial startup in their shoes would. Microsoft can improve its browser from now till doomsday — and if it does, we should applaud — but there is no way it can “cut off the air supply” of an open source project the way it could “squash” a company like Netscape. Firefox’s air is free.
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