Firefox in the news

The Daily Telegraph has published an article on why Firefox is stealing market share from Internet Explorer. Being a sticker-carrying Firefox evangelist (yes, I also own a Firefox t-shirt), I am surprised at the growing importance of the browser. I believe that people are finally realizing that IE is very vulnerable to virus and security attacks, while Firefox is more secure.

Something that still bothers me though is the large number of websites that do not test for browser compliance. Firefox will simply not load some pages properly because their designers only check their functionality in IE, ignoring the growing minority of Firefox users. Thankfully, there is a Firefox plugin called IE Tab, which opens Internet Explorer as a tab within Firefox and allows you to view pages without having to open the other browser.

Firefox is not only a better product, it is seen as "cool"by the geeky techno-elite tribe. According to the article, Firefox is making a profit thanks to Google ad income (and I'm sure that they must be making some money from t-shirts). The profit aspect may affect Firefox's street-cred and coolness currency, something not lost on the team:

"We have a user base of 40m to 50m people, who use our product as their -primary way of participating on the web," [Mitchell Baker] says. "That means we have a set of responsibilities and activities that we must conduct to be a responsible vendor - whether it is cool or not."

The fact that the Telegraph has published this article may also steal coolness from Firefox. What next? Endorsement from the Daily Mail? *shudders*