Chapter 19. The Future of Firefox and Thunderbird

IN THIS CHAPTER

• The History of Mozilla

• Firefox Versus Internet Explorer

• Thunderbird, Outlook, and Outlook Express

• The Internet As the Internet Should Be

Having made it this far, how far can we go?

Is Mozilla Jack the giant killer? Can Mozilla manage to upset Microsoft's lock on the browser market? We've found that Netscape on its own was not able to survive. However, perhaps the Mozilla business model is different. Netscape was a product that was initially sold to consumers; Microsoft quickly gave away Internet Explorer to users. It's hard to make money giving away your main product, as Netscape found out.

In this chapter we'll study the Netscape/Mozilla timeline, compare Firefox with Internet Explorer, and compare Thunderbird with Outlook and Outlook Express. We'll also look at what the Web should be, what it started out as, and what the future might hold.

Finally, we'll get a few opinions on the future of Mozilla.