Content Management Matters ™

The browser wars continue as the Mozilla Foundation, also known as the Rebel Alliance, releases the second beta of the upcoming 3.0 version of Firefox.

No longer considered an upstart competitor to Internet Explorer, the open source web browser has enjoyed steadily increasing market share and continues to be the browser of choice for those web workers fortunate enough to not be trapped behind a corporate firewall.

User Interface improvements in the beta include:

• Improved security with an upgraded Password Manager, automatic version checking of plugins and extensions, anti-virus integration with Download Manager, and the new Effective Top-Level Domain (eTLD) service designed to improve user privacy.
• Enhanced functionality with an upgraded Download Manager, improved rendering of international characters, full page zooming, and an animated tab strip.
• New personalization features with organized browsing using Places, a new organizer for managing history and bookmarks, plus an upgraded location bar.

Beneath the UI, there are two enhancements of particular interest:

1. Implementation of a cycle collector for better memory management. Firefox is known to devour memory a gigabyte at a time. Therefore, any improvement in memory management will be most welcome.
2. Support for offline browsing and web-based protocol handlers. Does this version of Firefox coupled with rich internet applications like Google Apps and Zoho Office Suite finally challenge Microsoft's supreme dominance in desktop productivity arena?

Stay tuned and find out.

35.4% versus 34.9%

Those numbers are cause celebre for every open source advocate and Microsoft hater across the globe.

According to the most recent set of browser usage statistics from W3Schools, Firefox has captured 35.4% of the browser market as compared to 34.9% for Internet Explorer version 6.

As exciting as this news is, the trends show that it was only a matter of time before Firefox took the lead in the race between the two most widely deployed browsers in the world.

Is Microsoft concerned? Probably more than they would ever admit. Regardless of the viability of these statistics, the Firefox development team deserves some major kudos for bringing some much needed competition to the web browser space.

How worried should Microsoft be about their declining marketshare and how satisifed should the Mozilla Foundation be with their growth? Let us know what you think in the comments.

In an effort to gauge the use of open source software on the enterprise level, Alfresco turns to its rapidly growing developer community to create a biannual report of user preferences with respect to: operating systems, application servers, databases, browsers, and portals.

This report, forever known as the Open Source Barometer, is generated by collecting opt-in survey data from Alfresco community members.