Ignoring open source is costing us dear
Firefox, the browser that dared to challenge the supremacy of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, has just reached 400m downloads - and deservedly so. It now claims a market share of nearly 20% in the UK and 30% in Germany.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Guardian's argument lands at the end of a two-year arc the corpus has tracked closely: Firefox's rise was already visible in late 2005 coverage of its momentum against the hunt, and by July 2007 it had hardened into a genuine European challenge, with a report flagging Firefox as a serious threat to IE across Europe. The 400m-download milestone and the near-20% UK / 30% German shares are the quantified confirmation of that trajectory.
Microsoft's position looks weaker than raw install numbers suggest: even after 100 million IE 7 installs, its browser kept losing ground through early 2007. The same week this piece ran, the EU Court of First Instance rejected almost all elements of Microsoft's antitrust appeal — so the company faces both a regulatory verdict and an erosion of its default-distribution advantage at once.
First-order effects
- Microsoft's browser strategy can no longer lean on Windows bundling alone: with Firefox at roughly one-in-five UK users and three-in-ten German users, Microsoft must compete on IE's own merits while defending its appeal losses in Brussels.
- Mozilla gains proof-of-scale — 400m downloads makes Firefox fundable and credible to enterprise buyers who previously treated open-source software as a risk rather than an option.
Second-order effects
- Web developers and site operators now have to treat Firefox as a first-class target alongside IE, raising testing costs for anyone building to a single-browser standard and accelerating demand for standards-compliant code.
- Other incumbent vendors watching the pattern — including Microsoft itself across its product lines — face pressure to engage with open-source licensing models rather than dismiss them, since the giveaway-the-client model is demonstrably taking share.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the browser stops being a bundled Windows feature and becomes a contested application market — weakening the strategic value Microsoft extracts from controlling the default client.
- Open source shifts from activist fringe to mainstream procurement category, with the EU's hardening stance toward Microsoft (the failed appeal) reinforcing regulators' appetite for alternatives to single-vendor stacks.
The trend: Free, open-source clients are converting distribution-by-default into distribution-by-choice, eroding the platform advantage incumbents get from bundling.