Is Mozilla’s Life Cycle Haste Microsoft’s Gain?

The Mozilla Foundation’s decision to kick development into high gear may prove as disastrous and harmful to its product as Microsoft’s complacency in letting Internet Explorer 6 languish for far too long hurt IE’s place in the market.

In the case of Microsoft, that decision proved harmful in the long-term and gave the competition an opening they needed. In the case of Mozilla, the very same situation may happen.

When Mozilla announced plans to release a new version of its browser every three months last March, the overwhelming reaction seemed to be one of disbelief. This was a company where release cycles were getting longer, not shorter, and attempting to copy Google’s rapid release cycle for Chrome seemed foolish for a company with a fraction of Google’s resources.

But when Mozilla delivered Firefox 5 earlier this month and announced it would not support Firefox 4 any more, people realized they were serious. And just as we get our hands on version 5, version 6 is already in development for a September release.

Mozilla did need a kick in the tail. It was only producing one major release version per year and Firefox had become everything it was supposed to stand against in Internet Explorer: it was bloated, slow, had compatibility problems and long-standing bugs. Google’s Chrome was just plain clobbering Firefox in performance and IE was getting a second look with version 9.

But this is too radical of a change. Many of my plug-ins from Firefox 4 are broken, and Google Toolbar doesn’t work. Would any developer blame Google or the plug-in developers from just throwing their hands up and waiting until Mozilla stops releasing a whole new browser every quarter?

IT is equally averse to this kind of change. Look at the Windows situation. No one in their right mind wants to stick with Windows XP but it still took months to get Windows 7 migrations going due to all of the compatibility testing required. Why would you adopt a browser you know will change before you even have a chance to start certification?

The end result is very likely a lot of people simply wait. Firefox 5 looks the same as version 4, but there are changes under the hood, particularly in how it handles CSS. One of the differences I noticed is the plug-in manager is now a separate process in the process window. It’s also a much faster and better-behaved browser. It no longer consumes 1.5GB of memory on my PC but keeps memory use down.

And since it doesn’t work with NetworkWorld’s CMS system, I have to load IE to enter this.

This presents Microsoft with an opportunity to regain some lost share, which continues to drop. At the same time, Mozilla’s mistake is not going to erase the problems with IE 9, as nice as it is in many ways. While IE 9 did bring a much better JavaScript engine and multi-core CPU support,  but it still has compatibility issues, lacks the plug-in aftermarket that is so popular with Firefox and there are a whole lot of interface quirks people don’t like. My pet peeve, for instance, is that it insists on sorting bookmarks alphabetically rather than letting me sort them as I want.

You can’t win a football game only playing defense, and you can’t win an election just because your opponent is lousy. There needs to be a proactive move here. Microsoft can gain back some of that lost share from IT managers fed-up with Mozilla’s self-inflicted chaos, but it needs to give people a reason to stick with IE, too.