Firefox: On the front lines of the Internet wars
Mitchell Baker has long been on the front lines of the Internet wars. As a lawyer at Netscape, she watched Microsoft steal market share (illegally, a federal court ruled) from the first software program that gave people easy access to the Internet. Since 1998, she's been at the forefront of the Mozilla project, which started out as a volunteer effort to build a better browser. (Mozilla was a nickname for the Mosaic Killer project started by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen to replace his first browser program.)
Since its formal launch in 2004, Mozilla's free Firefox browser has won plaudits from industry and academic experts, who say it is safer and more user friendly than Microsoft's Internet Explorer. IE has suffered from vulnerabilities to home-page hijackers, pop-up advertisers, and hacker programs that collect personal information from home PCs or turn home computers into "zombies" that obey hackers' commands. The endorsements and security improvements have helped Firefox eat into Microsoft's near monopoly. Industry analyst WebSideStory says 9 percent of all American Web surfers are now using Firefox, and IE's market share has fallen from a 2003 high of 96 percent to 87 percent today.
That success pushed Mozilla to turn professional. Baker is now chief executive officer of the for-profit Mozilla Corp., which uses revenue from search commissions to pay the 42 staffers who oversee the volunteers who still tweak and test the software. The leftover profits go to the firm's owner, the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation.
In the heart of Silicon Valley, Baker leaned back on the headquarters' beanbag chairs and explained how a tiny business, offering a free software program and helped by a bunch of volunteers, hopes to compete with the single most successful business in history.
U.S.News: With the recent controversy over false entries in Wikipedia, an open-source encyclopedia, how can you assure Web users that Firefox won't be vandalized?
Baker: A lot of people don't understand that. They think it is chaotic. They say how can you trust it if it is open source because anybody can put anything in? That is not the case in many open-source projects, and it is not the case in ours. You can't just check code in. At least one person and probably two people [staff members or trusted outside experts] are supposed to look at it first and make sure it does what it is supposed to do. It is a lot more disciplined than people think. We can tell you for any piece of code that is checked in, who checked it in, when it was checked in, what problem they thought they were solving, who looked at that piece of code and thought it was OK, how many revisions it had been through. . . . It is not like Wikipedia.
U.S.News: When Firefox first came out, it was safer than IE because it was so obscure that no bad guys were writing viruses for it. But now bad guys are writing viruses for all sorts of operating systems and browsers. [The latest report by Internet security analyst Secunia noted that Firefox had only two small software glitches that could be exploited and gave it a green light. Internet Explorer, which has 22 software vulnerabilities, received an orange warning light.] Will Firefox still be safer if it becomes more popular?
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