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Browsers and Commoditization

Vladimir Vukićević of Mozilla made waves yesterday with the discovery that Apple’s Webkit (the engine that powers the Safari browser) uses undocumented OS X features that are not available to other browsers running on the Macintosh. This is unlikely to point to a simmering conspiracy on the part of Apple, though it does illustrate clearly the advantage of controlling the platform on which you are developing your application. It is relatively straightforward for the Webkit guys to go to the OS X guys and say “we need access to this and that,” a route closed to outside developers.

Hopefully one message that will stick in people’s minds after they have digested this is that Mozilla is concentrating on the right things in finalizing Firefox 3. Memory consumption and performance have long been major criticisms of Firefox. The detailed analysis of Firefox 3’s runtime performance undertaken by Vlad demonstrates a renewed commitment to addressing these criticisms, as does Stuart Parmenter’s work on reducing memory fragmentation. Stories like this should help to win over geek hearts and minds, although end users will withhold judgment until they’ve actually tried the upcoming Firefox release.

A deeper question is what this implies for the web browser marketplace (and the software industry in general). Privileged access to low-level operating system features is just another advantage bestowed upon OS vendors, to add to their tremendous engineering muscle and unparalleled marketing clout, including access to the cherished OEM channel through bundling. With increased adherence to standards and widespread adoption of previously differentiating features like tabbed browsing, it is tempting to conclude that the web browser is rapidly turning into a commodity.

And this would doubtless be the blog post I was writing if it weren’t for one thing: Mozilla Firefox. Other attempts to introduce competition into the browser world have buckled in the face of the aforementioned challenges (Opera being a notable example). Meanwhile Firefox has gone from strength to strength. The explanation is for this counterintuitive state of affairs is complex. For one thing, Microsoft dropped the ball on Internet Explorer development once Netscape had faded into oblivion, leaving the door open for a determined competitor. Poor security, first and foremost, prevented IE from locking up the market when it had the chance. Firefox also introduced some features (liked tabbed browsing) that helped it gain a foothold before other vendors could catch up. Its extensibility has led to an amazing ecosystem of third-party add-ons that no other browser has come close to duplicating. And the Mozilla crowd also did some excellent marketing, the lack of which has hampered the adoption of other open source products.

Nonetheless, Firefox is increasingly looking like an outlier. It’s hard to think of another popular general-purpose software application developed by an independent third party. Practically all of the apps likely to be needed by most users are already bundled by both Microsoft and Apple. The real independent software market is now the web. Personally I find it hard to imagine ten years from now that any user (beyond a tiny percentage of hard-core geeks) will ever install a web browser on their computer. They’ll use whatever is already there when they buy it. Naturally there is still a huge opportunity for both Mozilla and Opera to be that pre-installed browser, on computers and on other devices like mobile phones, game consoles and televisions.

When the dust settles, the lesson here is not how nefarious Apple was in hiding top-secret programming interfaces from its competitors. In the short term, it is how committed Mozilla is to addressing the frequent criticisms of Firefox’s speed and footprint (and the positive implications for the success of Firefox 3). In the long term, it is that the advantages of operating system incumbents in the desktop software market are getting harder and harder to overcome.