Microsoft offers Firefox help to run on Vista but why?

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 22 August 2006 19:39

Opinion and Analysis

Microsoft is not a company renowned for helping serious competitors. However, the head of the software company's open source software lab, Sam Ramji, has said publicly in an online blog that he will help the open source Firefox browser and Thunderbird email client teams to get their products running on Windows Vista.

In fact, Ramji has said that, as an advocate for open source, he has actually set aside office space space and make Microsoft engineers available to the Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird teams should they decide to take up the offer.

Mozilla has yet to reply and there is no doubt that this is an unexpected and highly unusual offer. The rationale behind it is not immediately obvious.

Firefox in particular has emerged as a serious threat to the dominance of the Internet Explorer browser and continues to gain marketshare around the world. In some places, such as Germany, Firefox is now in the same ballpark of user acceptance. This competition is being aided in no small way by the tight collaboration between Mozilla and Google, which is pushing Firefox for all its worth.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer has trailed Firefox in the technology stakes for some time. Firefox is faster, more fully featured, more secure and has had the advanced functionality such as tabbed browsing and toolbar search that Internet Explorer 6 has lacked.

Microsoft is now playing catchup with its latest browser IE7, which is now in Beta 3. However, there is not much in Beta 3 that Firefox hasn't already had for sometime in its highly successful 1.x versions. Now Firefox is once again pushing ahead with version 2.

Some cynics might be tempted to wonder whether Microsoft wants its engineers to meet with the Firefox team for a few days to see what they can learn from an obviously very talented bunch of developers. Other cynics may raise the possibility that Microsoft is actually on a poaching expedition to see whether they can lure across the cream of the browser development crop with the promise of fame and fortune.

Then of course, Microsoft may just want to help the Mozilla team to integrate their products with Vista in the name of furthering the cause of open source development. Does anyone actually believe that?