Mozilla FireFox, the Open Source browser, was “officially” released at the beginning of November. Unusually for an Open Source product there was also an advertising campaign which included – believe it or not – a two page advert in The New York Times. After a month of its official release there have been over 10 million downloads.

In theory FireFox is a 1.0 release, and tradition insists that 1.0 releases of PC products are buggy, but I can confirm that it isn’t. I was an early adopter of the product and I have now been running it under Windows XP for about 6 months. This is the penalty (or reward) of being an industry analyst – you have to be an early adopter when you are tracking technology, and Bloor Research has been tracking Open Source since we first became aware of Linux in 1995.

Thus it was logical for at least one of us to try FireFox early on, and I was the volunteer guinea pig. However, I volunteered with enthusiasm because I had been experiencing “pop-up” hell with Internet Explorer and had become mouse click sick. I was even contemplating buying the Opera browser to kill the problem. I chose the pre-release version of FireFox instead, because I wanted to know about the quality of Mozilla. The quality was high.

So, given its ecstatic reception (10 million downloads qualifies as ecstatic in my view) does this mean that the browser wars are back on? Well the answer is almost certainly yes – in a way.

FireFox has already notched up an estimated 5 percent share of the browser market. The estimate is probably accurate, because Internet Explorer’s market share has dropped a corresponding 5 percent since May. Official market share figures from OneStat give 7.35 percent and from WebSideStory,  6.89 percent, but both figures apply to all Mozilla-based browsers including old versions of Netscape.

Microsoft has been tardy in addressing genuine end user dissatisfaction with IE, to the point where some users are actively seeking alternatives. The product hasn’t changed significantly in the last 3 years. That on its own might not matter much (except for the pop-up problem) were it not that there have been a rash of IE security problems in recent months. Since summer, over 20 new security holes have emerged in IE and they have been actively targeted by hackers – to install spyware, viruses or launch direct attacks. With some of the IE vulnerabilities, attacks can be initiated by the user simply clicking on a URL.

Notably (because it hit the press) officials at Pennsylvania State University have been recommending that staff and students cease to use Internet Explorer because of these security problems. Firefox does not suffer these vulnerabilities and came to market at the right time to catch this wave.

Microsoft’s problem with IE are a little ironic. Instead of having the browser as a free standing application, which it could easily have done, Microsoft bound the browser into the OS. This was a very effective way to kill off Netscape Navigator, but now it means that instead of being able to issue a completely new version of IE, it has to issue patches in the latest Service Pack. It doesn’t look like it will be able to fix the problem quickly.

So if it weren’t for the security issue (which is reason enough to consider staying with FireFox) would I still continue to use it? Well, actually the big win for me is tabbed browsing (being able to open up multiple web sites under different tabs in the same browser window). This is a useful feature. There are other good points, but actually none of them matter too much to me (there are some good plug-ins you can download, the overall design is pleasant – and I’m sure some FireFox users will post their opinions on such things below). But for me, to be honest, the browser is not a wildly important application, as long as it works.

Time will tell whether Microsoft’s IE dominance is under threat. One view is that Microsoft will respond to FireFox by achieving feature parity and will maintain its dominant market position simply through the sale of new PCs. Maybe so, but FireFox is not a solo product. There is also the ThunderBird email client and the SunBird diary. Add Open Office to this and you have a pretty good PC product portfolio. What is happening is that an Open Source stack is gradually developing on the desktop and, if it becomes popular, it really will be a threat to Microsoft’s hegemony.