A Blow Against the Empire
Prior to Firefox’s launch, though, Mozilla was mostly seen as an afterthought or, perhaps, some kind of crazy nonprofit group. This small group of open source hackers, known as Mozillians, were working on projects that virtually nobody thought they needed. The public certainly didn’t think it wanted a new browser. People were using Internet Explorer (IE), which Microsoft had bundled with Windows. In 2004, IE had approximately 95% of the web browser market.
I’m going to repeat that, because the number is ridiculously high: 95 percent.
.. The group that yesterday had been viewed as quixotic for attacking the 95% market share of Internet Explorer was suddenly lauded for having worked on the right problems, for the right reasons, even as the market told them those issues didn’t matter at all.
.. The Firefox success story was also an object lesson in how a small band of techies could take on giants such as Microsoft, which were thousands of times their size.