Nigel McFarlane's article at InformIT may be a little more analysis than the standard browser user is looking for, but there are some important points to consider in the article:
- Statistics on Mozilla usage:
Mozilla technology just won't go away: Its popularity grows slowly but surely, like tree roots crumbling a rock. As of April 2004, independent statistics show Mozilla to be 4% or more of the global market, but for web developers, use may be as high as 10%. In some markets, such as Germany, use may now be as high as 19%. On some platforms, such as Linux, Mozilla is now the dominant player, and probably well over 50%.
- A new brower war would push Microsoft to fix the "leaky, tricky, buggy mess" which is IE's security features.
- Standards such as XML, XHTML, and CSS. The open source platforms which support the Web--Apache, PHP, MySQL, Perl, etc.--are the "no-value zone for tools vendors such as Microsoft." Standards help to support these platforms, and MS has every reason to avoid implementing them.
- Longhorn aims to Microsoftize the Web:
The web is used to provide a variety of services and communities. Part of the Longhorn strategy is to extract from the web all of the services with any profit model at all: web magazines, auction sites, news, online retailers, and so on. When Microsoft tempts these organizations and communities to Longhorn, the web suffers the death of a thousand cuts. Over here will be the standards-based web, with a gradually shrinking set of web sites. Over there will be the future Longhorn-based proprietary global infrastructure—a global version of the early Novell NetWare, a sort of stock market/CNN fusion for content delivery.
Note that eweek has already explained that MS has been "applying for a rather amazing 10 patents a day" seemingly to protect Longhorn technology. I would caution that MS is not protecting it from other IT industry competitors who might emulate the technology, but rather from open source software, guaranteeing that there will be no open source competitor to MS's planned implementation of the Internet.
Link via Slashdot.
Longhorn -- Think it has a shot?
It will truly be a sad day for the Internet if Microsoft is able to carry out its plans with Longhorn. I don't think we can do enough to warn people of the danger before it's too late.
Americans are just too well-inculcated with late capitalist ideology. Even my colleagues in my Rhetoric and Technology class are incapable of seeing the dangers of overweening intellectual property laws and the proprietarization of formerly open Internet technologies.
Why are so many people incapable of realizing what free culture has to offer? I can understand a CEO of a recording company supporting Longhorn or its ilk, but why are so many otherwise genereous and sincere people unwilling to fight or even protest these detrimental cultural trends?
I have tried to educate people about the growing dangers to society posed by IP, but have encountered nothing but resistance, even among my fellow grad students who are supposedly well-steeped in critical theory and postmodernism. They will babble on about "otherness" and "access" all day long, yet spew vitriol in my direction whenever I mention abolishing IP law or challenge feudalistic notions of authorship.
I'm supposed to be gaining a doctorate soon in "Rhetoric and Composition," yet I lack the basic persuasive skills necessary to challenge people's pre-manufactured beliefs about intellectual property and authorship. I feel like a Galileo trying to convince a world of fundamentalists that "it moves."
Responsibility to advocate Open Source
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