When your rich, friendly neighbor goes into competition with you, what do you do? That’s what Mozilla has to figure out now that Google has brought out the Chrome browser to compete with Firefox.

Mozilla and Google were always the best of friends, right down to living next door to each other in Silicon Valley. For most of that time, Google was mentor, patron, and ally to Mozilla as it rekindled the browser wars and fought the good fight against the likes of Microsoft and Apple. Now, with Google backing its own Chrome product, things are bound to change.

Mozilla has even moved across town, physically separating itself from its former ally, and is working to hold onto it’s share of the browser marketplace against three giant competitors instead of two, according to a New York Times story. Google has not yet made the kind of inroads that Mozilla and Apple have against Internet explorer, but it is impossible to count out a company like Google. Mozilla needs to read and understand the new situation, and to learn to compete with their old friend.

There is more at stake here than just the numbers. Everyone else is in the game for the money. Mozilla is the lone standard-bearer of the Open Source philosophy, in which everyone can pitch in and anyone can get a copy of and customize the code. Mozilla operates in a completely different world that its competitors.

Sandeep Krishnamurthy is the director of the business administration program at the University of Washington at Bothell. Krishnamurthy, who recently wrote a paper on Firefox’s success, says “Mozilla is about a community coming together and saying it can compete with the largest software company in the world. There really is nothing like it.”

Google says that they are not out to injure Mozilla in the marketplace, and so far they have not. Google Chrome only controls about 2 percent of the marketplace while Mozilla is still growing and now stands at 22.5 percent. Although there is little fear at either company that Google will stop supporting Mozilla, everyone also has to admit that Google will continue to feel business and financial pressure to use and promote Chrome.

As for Mozilla, they have vowed to work harder to to keep Forefox viable by continuing to improve their product, and that their areas of clear leadership in the browser war may become fewer. Still, Mozilla and Firefox now have a very strong track record and they, too, will be hard to ignore as the struggle for browser supremacy continues.

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Entry was posted on Sunday, July 26th, 2009 at 8:13 pm under Apple, Google, Internet, Microsoft, Open source.

Read more entries by Michael W. Jones.
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