Jarvenpaa (1994), What is the Internet and the world wide web?, retrieved from ġ0. An extensive description of how Microsoft initially did not recognise the potential of the Internet can be found in Business Week's ‘Inside Microsoft’ article of 15 July 1996.ġ4. CSS: Cascading Styling Sheets: A language that allows programmer separate the visual definition of a web page from its content.ġ5. VBScript: Visual Basic Scripting Edition: An interpreted script language from Microsoft that is a subset of its Visual Basic programming language.ġ9. Document Object Model (DOM) is a ‘browser-neutral application programming interface (API) that lets web authors use scripts to automatically update parts of a Web page with fresh information’ ( CNET News, 2004, April 7).Ģ2. Special emphasis is placed on the development of a (national) cyber-infrastructure for science and engineering.Ĩ. B. Lock-in mechanisms, which historically have been reported to be dominant factors in standards battles, seem to have little impact in the context of open source software.ģ. See Egyedi and van Wendel de Joode (2004) for a detailed overview of standardisation in OSS development theory on (positive) ‘network effects’.ĥ. Not to be confused with the World Wide Web (Cailliau (n.d.), A little history on the world wide web, retrieved from ħ. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, aims, according to its website ( ) to be a leader in the development and deployment of new computing and software technologies for the scientific and engineering community. It will be argued that some characteristics of Open Source Firefox, such as the semi-open development approach and the involvement of commercial companies, partially explain the rise of this web browser. The analysis contributes to the understanding of standard battles in the context of open source software.

We examine two standards battles: first, Netscape versus Microsoft, followed by the more recent battle between Microsoft and Mozilla. The objective of this study is to explain the evolution of web browsers through the analysis of the competitive relationship between the main players in this ongoing battle. This tendency would seem to contradict the well-established belief that in a standards battle ‘the strong grow stronger while the weak grow weaker’. Recent years have witnessed a continuous erosion of the Microsoft Internet Explorer share in the web browser market, mainly induced by the continuous gains of Mozilla Firefox, an open source software product.

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