Times of darkness and monopoly :
By late 1990s, Microsoft had the biggest market share in terms of operating system. In order to monopolize the browser market, Microsoft bundled it's low quality browser with the OS and thus each windows computer, by default had internet explorer installed onto it. This was a major blow to Netscape and the likes of it.
How it came to be :
After a resounding success of open source software projects like linux and a detailed analysis of open source methodology by Eric S Raymond in his article "Cathedral and Bazaar", in March 1998, Netscape Communications Corporation released most of the code base for its popular Netscape Communicator suite under an open source license. This decision can be attributed to the goodness of open source methods as well as or more than that to Netscape's inability to cope up with the monopolistic practices by Microsoft. So, the Mozilla project was initially supposed to save Netscape suite from dying out. This point is important because what Firefox ended up being is (one can safely say) far more than what it was intended to be. Again, this just shows that once a technology is established, what new forms it can take and how it shapes the society is something which is hard to predict.
Impact of contemporary social and political situation :
At the time when Firefox was released, Internet Explorer had almost total monopoly over the browser market. People did not have any good alternative. Also Internet Explorer was notorious for not following the standards which were agreed upon internationally, instead, IE appeared to believe in setting its own (incompatible) standards and force the content creators to follow them.
Case of Firefox highlights the point that a new technology, however superior, has to suffer if the low quality technology it is supposed to replace is widespread and is not compatible with the new one. As every computer running windows had IE by default, content creators preferred to write specifically for IE than for standard compliant Firefox and the likes. Given the security, privacy and usability features of Firefox, nobody would be using IE by now if it was not forced upon the unknowing users by Microsoft.
At the same time, among the tech savvy people, Firefox became extremely popular because they hated IE knowing how bad a piece of software it is and the hatred was increased because there was no other considerable alternative. Thus for these people Firefox was a way to vent out their hatred of IE.
Where Firefox stands currently :
Today, 30% users use Firefox as their browser, this is a huge number considering that it does not come pre installed with windows. Due to its modularity and extensibility, Firefox has the largest collection of add-ons (small programs which enhance the browser in terms of looks or functionality). Not just that, but Firefox codebase has been used for totally unrelated programs. Some prominent examples are Songbird and Pencil. The former is a popular feature-rich media player while the later is a promising and flexible graphical user interface prototyping tool.
Firefox has been pioneering for standard compliant web and has done a great job of proposing standards for the future of the web. This has a direct impact on the user. Standardization means that there will no more be messages on websites saying "Your browser does not support X technology, please use Y browser!" As for the content creators, it means no time waste checking for cross browser compatibility.
Firefox as perfect 'softwarification' of underlying philosophy :
Firefox is based on the concept of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). As per FOSS ideals, a software must allow its user to modify it and use it the way he/she wants. According to FOSS, the right to modify and alter the software is a fundamental right of the user. Although any open source software can be (so to say) modified by anyone, there are certain practical issues. The code of the software must be modular, well documented and well organized for a user to be able to modify it easily. In the true spirit of FOSS, Firefox is an example of a extremely well organized and extensively documented neat code. This combination is rare and when achieved, unleashes the full potential of open source software. A notable example of this can be found on this blog, where the developer of one of the most popular add-ons for Firefox, no-script talks about how difficult it is to make an equally powerful script blocker for the Google Chrome (note that Google Chrome is also an open source browser). The huge number of add-ons available for Firefox testify that.
Also, for its latest release, Firefox has gone lengths to ensure that the release is as user friendly as possible. The idea of test pilot, where a user gets to test new features and register his/her opinion about it in a very layman friendly way, is very innovative and takes Firefox even closer to its core ideology of FOSS.
-Sujeet Gholap (CS09B010)
References :
[1] History of Mozilla (wikipedia)
[2] History of Firefox (wikipedia)
[3] "Cathedral and Bazaar" by Eric S Raymond
[4] Usage share of web browsers (wikipedia)
[5] "What is free software" by Matt Lee
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