IE stagnation spells trouble for all concerned

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.

Let's go, Gecko
So if Firefox starts to take off, why not build around Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine instead of around IE's?

For Chen Ming Jie, chief executive and chief technology officer of My Soft, the prospect of producing a Firefox version of his company's Maxthon browser is a possibility.

"I think Mozilla will be good enough to provide a better programming interface so we can build all our features on the Gecko engine," said Chen. "Actually we support Gecko now....But with the Gecko engine, you can not use all the features in Maxthon."

To provide full support for Gecko, Chen said he would have to invest considerable programming resources into building a new user interface.

For now, however, the browser shells are sticking with IE.

One reason is that a significant number of Web sites are coded specifically to work with IE, leaving others with faulty pages.

Second, Firefox, Opera, Safari and other minority browsers have enough bells and whistles that the browser shells can't make much of a sales pitch to their users.

"If I'm competing heads-up against Firefox, it's hard to come up with value propositions," said Stiles. "If I were to switch (from IE to Gecko) entirely, it would take several months of development work and it would be difficult to say, given limited development resources, that it makes any sense to do that...I wouldn't know how to make money."

Follow the money
As it is now, the browser shell business isn't generating huge profits. My Soft relies on donations, which a small but significant fraction of its users pay. The company also offers other browser applications.

Like Opera Software, Stilesoft offers a premium version -- for $29.95 -- and its free version carries some sponsored links. The company also co-brands its browser for internal use by companies including Amazon.

Microsoft said it benefited from the phenomenon of IE-based browsers and other third-party IE extensions, but was not concerned about the prospect of Firefox leeching away developers.

Instead, the company envisions a successful Firefox acting as an alternative, secondary platform much as Apple Computer's Macintosh operating system exists alongside Windows.

"I wouldn't expect fewer developers to target IE," said Gary Schare, Microsoft's director of security product management for Windows. "But some of the applications might target both. That's like applications that work on both Windows and the Macintosh, and it's up to developers to decide if the second platform or third platform has a large enough installed base to be a business opportunity to target. Many companies build for Windows and the Mac, and Microsoft is one of those."

Stiles, whose business grew out of frustration with IE, says the resuscitation of the browser war by an open-source group has taken him somewhat by surprise.

"I'm really impressed with Firefox, to be honest with you," said Stiles. "For four or five years it was easy to laugh it off, thinking they wouldn't get anywhere. But now they've got a really great product."