* Readers weigh in on Mozilla benefits
Several readers responded to last week’s newsletter on the open source Mozilla Web browser gaining market share vs. Microsoft Internet Explorer, and I’d like to pass along some of their comments.
The gains by Mozilla (and Netscape, which is based on Mozilla) were small – a 1% share increase, brining IE down from 95% to 94%. But Mozilla enthusiasts say the open source browser, which comes standard on most Linux distributions, has IE beat on many security and usability features.
“I have not touched Outlook or IE for over two years,” wrote one reader. “Sure I like [Mozilla] because it isn’t Microsoft, but there are other reasons. I [could] block pop-ups [natively in Mozilla] long before such things were possible [in IE]. Mozilla has a built-in mail system and a download for a built-in calendar system. It can analyze my mail and remove spam.”
“I had some adware on my computer that made me unable to open any Web sites,” another reader wrote. “I had Norton and Stopzilla installed on this computer and still got this adware installed. The fastest answer was to remove Microsoft Internet Explorer and install the [Mozilla-based] Firefox browser. I no longer have annoying pop-ups or problems with my home page being hijacked to an adware page. The average PC home user does not want to spend $45 to remove adware, viruses, etc. I think people will move to other browsers to get rid of the annoying issues around adware and viruses that make Internet Explorer vulnerable. Or hardware manufacturers will develop PC products that don’t allow write access except to a CD.”
Finally, another reader with an insider’s perspective had this to say:
“I was at a Mozilla party (Friday afternoon beer),” this reader wrote, “where one of the project architects raised his glass in toast to the first time in 15 years that he worked on a project that gained market share while competing with Microsoft.”
