Web Warrior
Quentin Hardy, from Forbes.com
Firefox firebrand Mitchell Baker says browsers are too important to be left to companies to build.
Winifred Mitchell Baker has all the scars of the netscape-microsoft browser war of the late 1990s. Once a lawyer for Netscape, the Web pioneer killed by Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people )'s Internet Explorer, Baker still contends that Microsoft exhibited "illegal, monopolistic behavior." But is she angry? She slaps a conference room table. "I don't want to wake up every day pissed off," she says sharply. "These are the early days of the Internet. I want to see what it can do." Baker, 50, is chief executive of Mozilla Corp., maker of the Firefox browser, the Internet gateway used by 120 million people in 50 languages. Its 13% share of world browser usage is startlingly high considering that to run Firefox you have to find the Firefox Web site and download the software yourself. Microsoft's Internet Explorer, or IE, has an 85% global share and comes loaded on every PC with Microsoft's Windows operating system. Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people )'s Safari browser has a 2% share.
Baker sees Mozilla as a democratizing check against the predations of some of the biggest names on the Internet. "We want to keep the Internet open and transparent, with users controlling the experience," she says. "There is no doubt that Microsoft and Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) will build great things, but they will do it for their shareholders." (Not that Google's shareholders are complaining or anything.)
Firefox has 50 in-house developers, but, in open-source tradition, 1,000 volunteers worldwide regularly contribute code. The result is what its users will tell you is a superior piece of engineering to Microsoft IE. Firefox was first to popularize tabbed browsing and first to integrate pop-up blocking, spell checking and antiphishing into the browser. It has a nifty word finder that doesn't require opening up a separate dialog box as in IE. Some 3,000 software extensions have been written to make it more versatile. Microsoft keeps the guts of IE very close to the vest. As a result it has only 700 add-ons listed at the Microsoft Marketplace download page.
But throwing out the work to the crowd has made Firefox hardier fighting hackers, too. In Symantec (nasdaq: SYMC - news - people )'s last three biannual reports of Internet security threats, the number of vulnerabilities in Firefox fell from 47 to 40 to 34. IE reported 38, 54 and 39. In the second half of 2006 Firefox had only a two-day window of exposure, on average, to malicious hacker exploits, the lowest of any browser. (Apple's Safari has had the lowest so far this year.) When IE had the field nearly to itself, says Baker, "you got all the pop-ups, the malware, the spyware--it bordered on the abusive. China is like that now, and it is because they are 99% IE."
Baker and her volunteer army are readying Firefox 3 for release early next year. It promises to be more secure, and there will be a version of Firefox for mobile phones. Her goal is a 20% to 30% global share. Volunteers have installed 80,000 "download Firefox now" buttons on Web sites. Earlier this year Mozilla hired away Li Gong, MSN's highest-ranking executive in China, to increase adoption of the Firefox browser in China, where it now has a meager 1% share.
Browsers themselves are not big moneymakers. Mozilla Corp. grosses an estimated $60 million a year from deals to put Google and Yahoo (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ) search boxes in Firefox's default page. Net income is kicked back as a royalty to Mozilla Corp.'s sole shareholder, the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation, which Baker also runs.
But there is an increasing opportunity to cash in on top of browser software, which has become the lever that controls much of what you see of the Web and how you see it. Browsers must communicate with all the audio and video applications on the kinetic Web and work with Web services that sites such as Amazon or Ebay have created to allow you to shop with them without having to visit.
"The browser is a curious and vital part of Internet computing. There is a market, but there is no money," says Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Microsoft Internet Explorer. There is pride, though. "I take what Mozilla says about us very personally," he says, and stresses that IE is tightening security on its own.
But there seems to be more entrepreneurial innovation over at Firefox. Stumbleupon was originally written as a Firefox extension, a toolbar you could put in your browser to help you find and share Web sites. Stumbleupon was recently sold to Ebay for $75 million. A tool for bookmarking pages called del.ici.ous went to Yahoo for some $15 million. Other big applications built on Firefox's underlying code include Songbird, an open-source version of Apple's iTunes, and Joost, a high-quality Web video channel.
Firefox's relationship with Google may see some stress over the next year or so as the search giant debuts its own browser, which will likely also be open to tinkering by amateurs. The ad blocker feature in Firefox almost certainly will not be in the Google product, however.
"Our interest to have people move around the Internet without IE is perfectly aligned with Google's," says Baker. "We are not aligned in providing value to Google shareholders." In August 2005 Google tried to persuade Mitchell Baker to make Google the exclusive search service on the Firefox start page, pushing out Yahoo. Baker said no. (Microsoft has talked about having its search on Firefox, but Baker says the results are suspect--a search for "Firefox" on Microsoft's Live.com had, for a time, a page for Microsoft developers as its first choice.)
Mitchell Baker, whose after-hours pursuits include conversational Mandarin and amateur trapeze flying, sticks out more than a little in the overwhelmingly male geek church of open-source software. She joined Netscape's legal staff in 1994, soon after the browser pioneer was created. She lasted through the company's downturn, precipitated by Microsoft's bundling of IE with Windows, a move the Justice Department determined was illegal. But the trustbusters couldn't resurrect Netscape.
After being laid off by AOL, which bought Netscape, Baker was at first a volunteer executive at Mozilla, an effort among Netscape employees to develop a free suite of browser, e-mail and newsreader software. The first Firefox browser emerged in November 2004; Mozilla Corp. was set up in 2005 as a conduit for the Google revenue and to employ a staff of engineers. "We're like a nongovernmental organization, with a revenue stream," says Baker. And evidently more effective than a bunch of government antitrust attorneys.