IE stagnation spells trouble for all concerned

While Stiles says NetCaptor downloads are still growing, and on any given day about 100,000 people use the application, the application's rate of growth has slowed noticeably.

"Firefox definitely has hurt," said Stiles. "We're definitely seeing people move in that direction. It's mostly anecdotal, when people write to me and say, 'I'm leaving, I'm going to Firefox.'"

The security factor
The reason most commonly cited in those defections, according to Stiles, is the factor that appears to be driving much of Firefox's momentum overall: security.

Internet Explorer has earned an increasingly sketchy reputation as security advisers including the U.S. government's CERT (Computer Emergency Readiness Team) have warned against using Microsoft's browser. (CERT praised recent security improvements that were part of the Service Pack 2 upgrade to the Windows XP operating system, but half of Windows users can't access them without paying for an upgrade to XP.)

NetCaptor and other IE browser shells -- including My Soft Technology's Maxthon browser, Avant Browser, Clickgarden, Crazy Browser, Deepnet Explorer, and 4c vision -- capitalise on users' frustration with IE's lack of features.

To a certain degree they also benefit from IE's security lapses, as some claim to plug security holes faster than Microsoft and provide additional protections.

Maxthon, for example, offers ActiveX blocking features for Windows operating systems back to Windows 98; Microsoft's ActiveX blocking features, introduced with SP2, are available only for owners of Windows XP.

But as security and feature frustration mount with IE, the so-called power users or early adopters who constitute the market for souped-up browsers are prone to hop on the Firefox bandwagon.

The size and influence of that bandwagon remain the subject of speculation. Some technology-focused Web sites have noted an increase in Firefox users. Other metrics suggest incremental gains by Mozilla-based browsers, but show IE still commanding more than 90 percent of the market.

Mozilla last month released the first preview release of Firefox 1.0, and blew away its initial goal of distributing 1 million copies in 10 days. As of Wednesday afternoon, the foundation said it had distributed more than 3.5 million copies.

One Mozilla Foundation developer said Firefox was ideally suited for creating extensions like toolbars.

"It's very easy to create extensions for Firefox," said lead Firefox engineer Ben Goodger. "You just build them using Web technologies like JavaScript and CSS that most Web developers are already familiar with.

Goodger pointed to the example of a Google toolbar clone based on Mozilla's code.