Foxy!

OK, here's something from geekland that actually might interest the rest of us. Firefox is a new Web browser. Wow, cool, huh? That's the kind of news that makes you reach for the 3rd quarter Exxon marketing report, right? But seriously, this is worth looking into.

As you may know, the "open source" movement in software design is based on unrestricted access and decentralized development through a global community of contributors. This is in contrast to the more traditional proprietary commercial approach, in which a software company develops intellectual property, hides the source code, and sells the product as is, with bug fixes and upgrades based on profitability and a business model.

One of the many advantages of the open source movement is that it seems to be much more stable and self correcting, an advantage often cited by supporters of Linux, the open source operating system. Bugs are quickly spotted and patched on the fly, potential weaknesses picked up early by an army of programmers, and security problems addressed before they can do too much damage. But this approach has another very important benefit that becomes more and more apparent as the Internet matures as a medium.

The most basic idea behing the Web itself is that it is a way to provide content in a generic fashion, so that anyone anywhere can access information through the Inter This is the concept behind HTML, the language that is used to write Web pages. Since it is generic, in theory anyone with any type of computer can read the information. Unfortunately, in practice, Web authors frequently code so that their sites will look good on the dominant Web browser (Microsoft's Internet Explorer). While this is understandable, in some cases, the site will ONLY be readible on IE, thus defeating the whole purpose of the Web. Furthermore, sites with complex functions (such as bank account access sites) often will not work at all on browsers other than IE.

What an open source browser such as Firefox can do is to stick to universal standards, while being flexible and modifiable enough to allow users to access sites that may not adhere to standards themselves (using extensions). This is very important, since the Web is rapidly becoming a major repository for human discourse, reporting, knowledge and dialogue. It is not in the public's best interest to move in a direction where more and more of the world's information can only be read by using a proprietary product distributed by a single corporation.

Breaking the cycle of dependancy on proprietary software on the Web is important, and requires that Web authors make the effort to keep their sites functional on all browsers that adhere to Web standards. The more people who use non-IE browsers, the more pressure there will be on designers to resist just coding for IE, and writing off the rest of the Web community.

Take a look at Firefox, available as a free download for all types of computers and operating systems, just out of beta development and available as a 1.0 release. For more information, read these sites for background information on the open source movement, on Firefox and on Mozilla, the organization behind this browser. Finally, Salon.com has an interesting article on the history of the whole project.