Is Firefox a "disruptive innovation?"
By glazou on Tuesday 14 June 2005, 10:04 - Mozilla - Permalink
Frank Hecker wrote a quite long and very interesting article about this fundamental question. I say fundamental since answering the question is almost an attempt at forecasting Firefox's fate. Unfortunately, in my humble opinion, the article does not spend enough time on a key factor of Firefox being its great extensibility, just a few words to say it's extensible using simple Web standards and that IE was already extensible through HTCs/HTAs. From my perspective, Firefox's extensibility mechanism is a - if not the - key factor making Firefox a disruption. It is so simple and so powerful that it does allow (a) existing users to do what they already did in a cheapest/safest/cleanest way (b) application writers to do what they did in very different and/or more advanced ways (c) new users/app writers to do things they could not do in the past. HTCs/HTAs never reached that, never offered that flexibility - if you except the dangerous and extremely poorly documented "binary HTCs". You can do so much more with Firefox than with MSIE. Firefox extensibility is highly disruptive.
BTW, I already wrote on this blog that PhoenixFirefox is a disruptive innovation. That was more than two and a half years ago...
Comments
I now use on a daily basis Greasemonky and Platypus, it is for me the key to enter the customisation power of Firefox, as I never managed to make an extension.
With this door, I can now see Firefox+javascript as the new Emacs+lisp
Thanks for the comments on my post. (Incidentally, I'm sorry I don't yet have a comments system on my own blog.) You are correct, I should have spent more time on the Firefox extensions system. In my defense I can only say that I wrote my post very late at night and was not fully awake! More seriously, I myself am not a developer of Firefox extensions and really don't even use them that much, so I tend to forget the power that they represent.
I still think that Firefox viewed purely as a browser and nothing else is more of a sustaining disruption. However once a user makes a decision to use Firefox, or a developer makes the decision to support Firefox with their web-based application, then I agree that the extensibility of Firefox opens up new possibilities for both user and developer, and some of those are disruptive in nature. More specifically as you note they represent a new market disruption that allows both users and developers to do new things in new contexts, things that previously were relatively difficult to do. I hope to have more to say about this in my next post about competing with IE.
On your previous comments from 2002, I had actually seen them at the time but had forgotten them. But how could I forget, knowing your company's name?
The Firefox extensibility might have some potential but the Firefox Extensions haven't shown much disruption so far. They're not sufficiently advertised and the distribution is awful. Once you have downloaded the browser, the only way to get new Extensions is through the Tools menu that normal users never touch. The few more adventurous users who try it are lead to the Mozilla Update pages where only real geeks can find their way through. And in the end, how many "real" users download the Extensions? The Top-10 is quite representative: with the exception of one Extension for weather forecast, they're all for geeks and programmers.
For real disruption, we would have to look at the MacOS X Dashboard Widgets. The system was released less than 2 months ago and more than 500 Widgets are already available for download from the Apple web site. They are advertised as the main feature on the web site's front page. The very large majority of them are very nicely done little standalone applications. The distribution is beautiful, it really makes you want to search and try them all. And even the Apple developer pages are much more inviting: the first thing that comes to your mind when reading them is "Hey, that's easy, I can do that!".
developer.apple.com/macos...
developer.apple.com/docum...
Firefox has been downloaded 60 million times, Tiger only 2 million times and still the Dashboard Widgets are much more thriving than the Firefox Extensions. Really the comparison hurts, but at least Mozilla knows where to look at in order to cause real disruption.
I've updated my article to address some of the comments above. As I wrote in my previous comment, I am willing to concede that Firefox extensibility is a disruptive innovation (and/or can provide the basis for other disruptive innovations), but I believe that (at least at present) this is not relevant for the vast majority of Firefox users (as Pierre notes). I remain convinced that for the vast majority of users Firefox is mainly a sustaining innovation, and that that has been the secret of its success thus far.