Monday, October 04, 2004

There's a new browser from the makers of Mozilla, called Firefox, that's getting lots of attention--and not just from the geeky set. The Mozilla Foundation open source project, which is funded by Time Warner, IBM and Sun Microsystems, launched Firefox version 0.9 on June 15. Firefox 1.0 is due out by early November.

"For the first time in a while, we're seeing real momentum behind a browser other than IE," says Steve O'Grady, an analyst at enterprise software outfit Redmonk, based in Bath, Me. "Consumers are starting to use Firefox, and that has developers considering both platforms when they're building Web sites."

Internet users began switching in earnest during the summer after several security problems emerged with IE, which of course is built into Microsoft's ubiquitous Windows operating system. Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) issued a patch for Windows XP, that platform's most recent iteration, but users complain that IE hasn't truly been updated since 2001. Anyone using Windows 98 or Windows 2000 who wants the most secure system has to upgrade to XP and download the patch, called Service Pack 2.