SnakebyteXX
01-25-2005, 09:52 AM
For Rob Davis, the final straw came during a beautiful weekend last summer, which he spent holed up in his Minneapolis apartment killing a zombie. The week before, a malicious software program had invaded Davis' PC through his browser, Internet Explorer, using a technique called the DSO exploit. His computer had been repurposed as a "zombie box" - its CPU and bandwidth co-opted to pump reams of spam onto the Internet. Furious, Davis dropped out of a planned Lake Superior camping trip to instead back up his computer and reformat his crippled hard drive. Then he vowed never to open IE again.
Lucky for Davis, a new browser had just appeared on the scene - Firefox, a fast, simple, and secure piece of software that was winning acclaim from others who also had grown frustrated with Internet Explorer. A programmer friend told Davis about Firefox. He didn't know that the browser was an open source project and a descendant of Netscape Navigator now poised to avenge Netscape's defeat at the hands of Microsoft. He just knew that he didn't want to waste another weekend cursing at his machine. So Davis drove to the friend's house and copied Firefox onto his battered laptop. He hasn't had a problem since - and now he's telling anybody who will listen about Firefox's virtues. "I'm no anti-Microsoft zealot, but it's unconscionable that they make 98 percent of the operating systems in the world and they let things like this happen to people," says Davis, a PR man by day who liked Firefox so much that he initiated a fundraising campaign to help promote the browser. "There's a lot of pain out there."
Firefox couldn't have arrived at a better time for people like Davis - or at a worse time for Microsoft. Ever since Internet Explorer toppled Netscape in 1998, browser innovation has been more or less limited to pop-up ads, spyware, and viruses. Over the past six years, IE has become a third world bus depot, the gathering point for a crush of hawkers, con artists, and pickpockets. The recent outbreak of malware - from the spyware on Davis' machine to the .ject Trojan, which uses a bug in IE to snatch sensitive data from an infected PC - has prompted early adopters to look for an alternate Web browser. Even in beta, Firefox's clean, intuitive interface, quick page-loading, and ability to elude intruders elicited a thunderous response. In the month following its official November launch, more than 10 million people downloaded Firefox, taking the first noticeable bite out of IE's market share since the browser wars of the mid-'90s.
More here:
The Firefox Explosion (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.02/firefox.html?tw=wn_tophead_4)
Lucky for Davis, a new browser had just appeared on the scene - Firefox, a fast, simple, and secure piece of software that was winning acclaim from others who also had grown frustrated with Internet Explorer. A programmer friend told Davis about Firefox. He didn't know that the browser was an open source project and a descendant of Netscape Navigator now poised to avenge Netscape's defeat at the hands of Microsoft. He just knew that he didn't want to waste another weekend cursing at his machine. So Davis drove to the friend's house and copied Firefox onto his battered laptop. He hasn't had a problem since - and now he's telling anybody who will listen about Firefox's virtues. "I'm no anti-Microsoft zealot, but it's unconscionable that they make 98 percent of the operating systems in the world and they let things like this happen to people," says Davis, a PR man by day who liked Firefox so much that he initiated a fundraising campaign to help promote the browser. "There's a lot of pain out there."
Firefox couldn't have arrived at a better time for people like Davis - or at a worse time for Microsoft. Ever since Internet Explorer toppled Netscape in 1998, browser innovation has been more or less limited to pop-up ads, spyware, and viruses. Over the past six years, IE has become a third world bus depot, the gathering point for a crush of hawkers, con artists, and pickpockets. The recent outbreak of malware - from the spyware on Davis' machine to the .ject Trojan, which uses a bug in IE to snatch sensitive data from an infected PC - has prompted early adopters to look for an alternate Web browser. Even in beta, Firefox's clean, intuitive interface, quick page-loading, and ability to elude intruders elicited a thunderous response. In the month following its official November launch, more than 10 million people downloaded Firefox, taking the first noticeable bite out of IE's market share since the browser wars of the mid-'90s.
More here:
The Firefox Explosion (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.02/firefox.html?tw=wn_tophead_4)