One of the ideals that the open source community has always held is a just and noble one - the freedom of choice. Open source has ofttimes been the pliers that rescue the ideas of software choice from the jaws of monopolizing, or popular ideas (such as ultra-minimalistic window managers). Still, it is here where the poster child of open source fails, and it fails in a way that should bring shame to the open source community. Unfortunately, Mozilla Firefox is still accoladed by its pros and is given the blind eye to its cons.
Whenever you visit a tech-embedded or tech-oriented IRC channel, you're likely to find some sort of dogmatic zealot around. You can have your open source zealot, your gratis (free as in beer) zealot, and your closed-source zealot. In the mix you'll have free-rangers, people who aren't zealots, but if their opinion is prompted, they'll describe to you in painful detail the advantages of their favorite text editor/window manager/web browser. Keeping that in mind, you decide to visit one of these IRC channels. Go inside, and present a meaningful argument against Firefox (assuming you don't say something like ``Firefox sucks, Opera pwnz j00'') and you've just made enemies with half the channel. Why? Not because Firefox is a Good Thing, it is a Good Thing. But to downplay Firefox is to downplay the very concept of open source, or so it seems.
Firefox represents something that every open source project strives to be. It represents usability, the ability to be used easily by people of all technical expertise; utilitarianism, a program tuned to what it advertises (which emacs does too, advertising and genre are two different things); and of course, it represents market share. Firefox seems to have made a dent into the impenetrable steel jaws of the corporate world, in this case Microsoft Internet Explorer (herein referred to as MSIE). With all these achievements behind its belt, why shouldn't Firefox's success show? It should, but read on to find out my concerns.
A lot of the appeal of Firefox is luck. Firefox happened to become mainstreamed in the open source community around the time a flurry of security bugs began to bombard MSIE, the market leader. Just as water seeps into a cracked rock, Firefox began to seep into the cracks of Microsoft's market share. As time went on, and MSIE began to fight what seemed like a losing battle, winter fell over our little rock, turning the water into ice, and allowing it to further crack the rock. It seems just - after all, this incredulous feat has been won out of sheer open source merit right? Wrong. Firefox has become a misguided theocracy.
All this exposition and dry facts and semi-witty analogies disparaging Firefox, but where's the meat? Well look no further. Firefox has become a theocracy of its own right, and it started much before the plague of Spread Firefox. Firefox has become something of a cult phenomenon. I used Firefox not as a well-known browser, nor as a little-known browser known as Firebird, but an unknown browser known as Phoenix. I would tell my friends how wonderful Phoenix and Firebird is, and how you should switch, and they simply replied ``Why should I switch? I'm fine with Internet Explorer''. Of course, I stopped there, but Firefox adopters did not. They began to tout the advantages of Firefox everywhere, ``Firefox is more secure'' or ``Firefox is more stable'' or ``Firefox is smaller'' or ``Firefox is faster''. They went to every length to convince their tech-savvy friends, and tried to simplify and gloss over their barely tech-literate friends. Some friends of mine who use Firefox have gone so far as to go to a not-so-tech-savvy person's house, and make Firefox their default browser, while trying to make its interface as accessible as possible for the MSIE user. A few tech support calls later from said friend, and Firefox is analogous with the desktop icon that says ``The Internet''. Then came the monstrosity called Spread Firefox. People began trying to use every single cheap trick in the book to convert others to Firefox. Ads began bombarding the web touting the advantages of Firefox, it became a race to see just how many dirty tricks one could use to push their neighbor to Firefox, for once they used it ``they were seduced''. More trendy geeks have tried fervently (and succeeded to a point) to make Firefox part of pop culture. Almost every day in slashdot's daily newsletter you see an article about Firefox, but nothing about other browsers. Now, don't mistake my criticism, Firefox is a very good browser with many top-notch features else being ``seduced'' would not matter, people would just switch back. But the manner in which its proponents hung up the Firefox banner was simply deplorable.
By now if you're a Firefox zealot, if you're still reading this and not creating an effigy of me and placing it on a dart board, then you're probably pretty angry at me. I mean, after all, I am being a proponent to an insecure browser such as MSIE, no? Wrong. I'm playing the underdog. MSIE is a browser that I do not like, true, but that doesn't mean that other browsers do not exist. Browsers such as dillo, Opera, lynx, links, Konqueror, Epiphany, and KMeleon are lost in this maelstrom of Firefox marching. I am not pro-browser (although I have a preference, I will not share that preference in this document), rather I'm pro-choice. Long open-source software has stood for the underdog, giving almost-fair share to uncommon products and markets, but Firefox is simply the unanimous choice. You may also tell me that ``The simple choice is to convert unaware users to Firefox in order to save them from themselves'', but that's not true. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach him how to fish and you feed him for life. The only true solution is to make people aware of the choice, to present them with the opportunities, and to allow them to pick. Firefox is a nice second, but isn't and shouldn't be the advertised first, nor should it be emphasized in nearly the way it has.