Mark Evans

In
the name of hyperbole, November 9, 2004 could go down as a seminal
moment in the Web's history. On that “fateful” day (how's that for some
hype?), the Mozilla Foundation launched Firefox 1.0 and
life has never been the same for Microsoft's Internet
Explorer ever since. With more than 100 million downloads and
about 10%
of the browser market, Firefox has become popular and reinvigorated the
market by giving IE a real rival following the “demise” of Netscape.
Hopefully, this will mean a better IE when version 7.0 is
released. At the same time, there seems to be more activity in the
browser market with the recent launch of Flock (albeit a lame
out-of-gate beta release that did Flock more harm than good). The
future for Firefox is exciting not only because of additional market
share gains but how the Mozilla Foundation and third-party developers
can push forward the innovation envelope. What I'd like to see is
Firefox create different versions aimed at different market segments.
For tech-savvy users, there could be a lite or no-frills version that
would let them add the extensions and features to create a custom-made
browser. For people who can't be bothered with the DIY version
or don't have the interest and/or aptitude, there could be a
fully-loaded
Firefox or, at least, one with all kind of standard features. I wonder
whether more Firefoxes or Flocks wil emerge. If you look at
the search market, there's plenty of new players despite Google's
dominance. Perhaps the browser market will evolve in a similar way with
products aimed at specific niches - i.e. a browser with a
built-in media player for music lovers; or a browser with a
built-in audio publishing tool for podcasters.