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Firefox Exec Says Windows Bundling Is a Bad Idea
eldavojohn writes "The Firefox executives say they don't want to be bundled with Windows. Firefox architect Mike Conner also said this of Opera, 'Opera's asserting something that's provably false. It's asserting that bundling leads to market share. I don't know how you can make the claim with a straight face. As people become aware there's an alternative, you don't end up in that [monopoly] situation. You have to be perceptibly better [than Internet Explorer].' He also told PCPro that they are worried about becoming the next monopoly just like Microsoft is now."
I think Mozilla in a monopoly situation would be an interesting case study because it would be completely unique - somehow it manages to dominate market share, and yet its competitors can copy any of its features or redistribute their own flavor of the same product?
Is a monopoly even possible for an open source company? Is a monopoly possible for anyone possible when everyone is using a share-and-share-alike license like the GPL?
Mozilla execs have absolutely no business-saavy or sense. Are they joking? They couldn't have a monopoly considering their business model. Their product is free, and does not prevent competitors from entering the market. Someone in Mozilla's PR department needs to shut these clowns up.
Similes are like metaphors
Tell that to anyone who refers to the blue 'E' as "The Internet".
TODO: Something witty here...
The key thing that you have to remember is that IE5 was honest to God the superior browser in its day. It was small, it was fast, and it was more standards compliant than the competition. Plus it didn't crash when you nested DIVs or TABLEs. In comparison, Netscape was a joke. A joke that quite a few users hung to religiously, but a joke none the less.
Now the tables have been turned. IE6/7/8 is the Netscape of today. It's a joke compared to the competition. Some people hold to it religiously, but most are ready to move on. Bundling is definitely helping to prop up IE, but there's more to it than that. IE is primarily held in place at corporations where the "corporate standard" requires IE. (Usually IE6.) This is partly due to a lot of poorly written applications on the market. But partly it's due to the mono-culture idea that Microsoft perpetrated in organizations. i.e. If it's made by Microsoft, it's made for Windows, and therefore is superior to a product that is not made for Windows.
Some IT professionals even believe that using IE means that they can rely on the Windows Update Service to keep their desktops secure. They are suspicious of Firefox and other alternative browsers because their update services are separate from Windows. Little do they seem to know that they are walking right into the lion's mouth...
If being better than IE at the same price (free) leads only to a 20% marketshare, then to me this *strengthen* the argument that bundling is an effective way to assert a monopoly, not disprove it.
Beside given the size of Firefox or Opera, users on dialup may feel quite annoyed by having to download them..
I Believe Conner's somewhat contrary to himself in his overall viewpoints. He claims that one of the challenges of Opera is that it is a bit to technical and "gets in the way," implying that it is geared towards a more technical user. However, I am not aware of that many non-technical users who go out looking for alternative browsers.
My own experience thus far has been that without bundling Firefox, it is primarily technical users who are encouraging the non-technical to actually use it. I know my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends, etc. all generally use whatever comes with their computer, which is Internet Explorer. They knew nothing about Firefox until I heavily promoted it and provided easy to access download links for them. This was only done because I grew tired of trying to explain why they kept getting infected with malware and viruses through IE. Most did not even know it is possible to browse the web with anything else.
By bundling an alternative, the masses have access to choice. I don't agree with Conner that we should simply expect people to want to go out and research and naturally find Firefox. Bundling does not imply stuffing an alternative down someones throat. It merely provides an easy mechanism towards an alternative. And for the non-technical, just awareness of an alternative is a huge win.
Bundling isn't the biggest reason IE users switched to IE, it was because IE4 was better than Netscape Navigator. I'm writing big and long posts about Vista being better than Ubuntu, and I think that it is, but I would never in my right mind use IE7 over Firefox. Although, frankly, right now my favorite browser is Google Chrome. In any case, this isn't like 1994 when people did not know how to download software. Right now, people download stuff all the time, from chat programs to games and utilities, and wallpapers, songs, and more. None of that is bundled, but people manage fine. Same thing with browsers.
I mean, Paint is bundled with Windows, but that hasn't stopped anyone from making their own paint programs, now has it?
This is my sig.
after all, look how miserably microsoft failed trying to dent netscape's marketshare when it started bundling internet explorer with windows
will anyone ever take netscape down as top dog of the browser wars?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Way to miss the issue there, PC Pro.
The courts have found that the bundling of MSIE is anti-competitive and in violation of antitrust laws. Just how would bundling Firefox on Windows remove MSIE from the base sysem? Oh, I see, it wouldn't.
Look if the remedy for anti-competitive and predatory business practices is to remove MSIE, then just remove it. It doesn't matter how many other similar applications are pre-installed, when it is the presence of MSIE, not the absence of other applications, which is in violation of the law.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
'Opera's asserting something that's provably false. It's asserting that bundling leads to market share.
Go on then. Prove it.
there are millions of people in each country that have NO idea of what does even a 'web browser' mean. for them, they open up windows, and then connect to 'internet'. internet explorer is 'internet' for them. leave aside trying out new 'browsers' ...
and no, you cant discount these people. for, these are the masses.
Read radical news here
Sadly he is correct about IE being better than netscape at one point in time. Netscape after being bought by AOL went down the tubes and IE was one of the best that was available for Windows in my opinion. Unfortunately there are still a few sites that do not work in firefox for me and I have to suffer through IE, but other than that I never use it anymore.
Vista for some uses (users) is better than Ubuntu. There are games that do not run on Ubuntu, I cannot easily update my blackberry (without hacks anyway) on Ubuntu. I still have to dual boot my laptop for a few things. It doesn't mean that Vista is a superior operating system, it just means for somethings/people it is better. If I get marked troll so be it.
I can't even get myself to read the article when I see quotes like this:
"It's asserting that bundling leads to market share. I don't know how you can make the claim with a straight face."
And if anyone falls for this, they need to look in the mirror and ask themselves, who they'll be suckered by next.
When you own the distribution channel as Microsoft does, bundling is _instant_ market share. And it helps when your have a very ignorant customers who take little to no time to try another product to see if it is better. _Better_ doesn't matter to most Windows users because they are mostly have very little understanding of the thing to begin with. And don't tell them that, they think they know everything there is to know about computers. After all, they know how to use MS Office. IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
For my dad's machine, I just delete the quicklaunch icon for IE, install FF, and tell him "just click this orange and blue thingie instead of the blue E. It's the same thing". Works fine.
Exactly. I end up using IE at work because all of the users log into their email wich is run on an exchange server. So when they are logged into their email account they loose some features if they are using firefox compared to using IE. I try to secure things as much as possible using GPO's and such but it still is something that's sore with me. The people who run the mail servers decided a few years ago to only use microsoft solutions. So we are pretty much stuck with it as a standard for almost everything just because of that one system. So far it works pretty good but I could see a few different solutions that would not only run as good but be cheaper and just as easy to maintain. In some cases things could be done better if we weren't so stuck on Microsoft. They really get you hooked all their systems tie together and it's so easy to just say hey were running active directory so we migth as well run exchange. Hey were running those so why not use sharepoint and so on until your in a situation where you don't even want to think of switching to something else. They're like meth dealers. They get you hooked and the shits gonna kill ya.
Actually Netscape killed itself.
Netscape 3.0 was about even with IE3 in terms of crappiness.
But Netscape Navigator 4.x was worse than it's competitor. It was flaky and crashed a lot.
Then it took ages for the Netscape team to come up with something better - they threw out everything and tried to rewrite this Mozilla thing from scratch. Fine.
Trouble is there was a LONG gap between Navigator 4.x and something significantly less crap. It took them YEARS.
Netscape Navigator 4.08 => 1998, Navigator 4.8 => 2002. 4 years and that code branch did not really improve significantly.
As for the Mozilla branch? Netscape 6 and 7 aka Mozilla 0.6 to 1.0 were not worth using. Bloated and buggy.
Honestly, when did Mozilla actually start to be good enough for "Aunt May" to use? I'd say maybe sometime after 2005? 2006?
Firefox/Mozilla was leaking tons of memory for ages (still does sometimes). Even though IE also leaks memory in some cases, the thing is you can easily start multiple instances of IE whereas it's hard to do the same with FF/Mozilla. I remember Mozilla and Opera giving me memory consumption problems even in 2005.
They only started making significant inroads in fixing memory leaks and other problems _recently_.
So what was Joe Sixpack to use between 1998 and 2006? Mozilla was too crap. Opera? Opera used to either cost money, or be ad ridden (till 2005).
IE was crap, but it was the least crap choice for most people.
Yes bundling of IE hurt Netscape - especially in the dial up days - try downloading Netscape 6 over a 33.6 modem. But the main problem was the early "Mozilla" Netscapes weren't worth downloading even if they were quarter the size.
You do what?! Do you realize how insecure IE6 is? Do you realize that they basically gave up fixing certain security holes in it because they were fundamental to the design? The only real Security Update for IE6 is in fact IE7 or Firefox. IE6 is garbage. It is prone to drive-by downloads of malware and browser hijacking even when no user input is provided.
"'Bundling' that forbids vendors from including other programs is where M$ falls foul of the market and law."
Law yes. Market no. The market has no preferences toward stability or growth in any long-term situation or biases towards any greater good. The market is an unthinking non-entity that is invoked to gloss over ideas and trends which economists don't fully understand.
Whenever I see a quote from someone involved with Mozilla, it almost always makes the guy seem like an idiot. I'm hoping the people who get quoted are the superfluous executives and don't really have much influence on the quality of the product.
Bundling doesn't lead to market share, hey? Let's see... who has the biggest market share? It wouldn't be the only product that's bundled, would it?
the next person i see who writes "correlation does not equal causation"
it's a mindless kneejerk reply, and it insults the intelligence of anyone reading your words
1. it announces with smarmy glee a concept that your audience already knows
2. a lot if not most times correlation does actually reveal causation
i wish i had the power to singlehandedly wipe that meme from every reply i ever read a again. it's an insulting mindless remark that pisses people off. next time, just explain why you believe what you believe about cause and effect, and leave out the patronizing smarmy "correlation!=causation" please
no, it does not come as an amazing mind blowing observation when you point it out for the 10,000th time, can you believe it?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Love it.
Now what if your car comes bundled with 3 steering wheels. The MS wheel comes attached to the steering column in front of the drivers seat, and the other two are in a compartment in the trunk. (The Firefox wheel can change colors and has a button that makes your headlights blink on and off. The Opera wheel is a little smaller, and just has a simple horn button.)
You can swap the steering wheels around, but whenever you get your car serviced they upgrade you to a new MS wheel installed on the column for free, and put your other wheel back in the compartment in the trunk (its part of the EULA... you just didn't read it).
Would you use those other wheels?
blog
I think maybe it's still not clear what he's saying. Let's try this:
If bundling is what leads to market share, how did Firefox get 20%?
See what he's trying to say? Why is it so hard for people to get this?
There are two ways that bundling does not lead to market share. Here:
He didn't say these things in the clearest way. Certainly what he said was easily misinterpreted. But he can be reasonably understood to mean this, especially in context. Sure he could have spoken better, but, geez, let's be active readers and mentally insert some adverbs until the quote makes sense.