The blogosphere is buzzing with talk about Mozilla Foundation's two-page Firefox ad in the New York Times. Whatever the merits of Firefox as a browser (I'm still a happy Camino man myself), this strikes me as an interesting moment for the Open Source movement. In launching this very public challenge to Internet Explorer, Open Source is, effectively, throwing down the gauntlet in front of Microsoft. On one level, since Microsoft doesn't really make any money on IE, this is maybe not as critical a battle as Linux vs. Windows or OpenOffice vs. MS Office. But given IE's symbolic importance (as the centerpiece of of the federal antitrust case against Microsoft), and the centrality of web browsing to many people's computing experience, I think this does constitute a frontal assault on the Microsoft monopoly. I don't really expect IE to lose its staggering dominance of the browser market, let alone a serious weakening of Windows/Office, but 10 million downloads in a month is nothing to sneeze at, and if a significant minority of general computer users get comfortable with using open source software for one of their core activities, one could start to imagine them exploring other open source alternatives for other activities. I also wonder how long it will take until some state or large municipal government orders its units to move to open source, either because of security concerns or as a cost-cutting measure (speak of the devil, the Dutch city of Haarlem has done exactly this).

In the midst of all this new browser news, I've also been kicking it old school. I downloaded a version of the text-only browser lynx for OSX. This is partly nostalgia—I used lynx, along with pine for email and pico for text-editing, back in the day (when I dialed in to campus on a 1200 baud modem)—and partly practical interest (running web pages through lynx is a pretty good way of checking for accessibility problems and structural flaws). I also get a feeling of smug satisfaction, akin to rollerskating between the cars in a traffic jam, as I bypass the gratuitous graphics, Flash intros, and and other nonsense that bloat out so many sites. Actually, given the recent trend of disabling browser capabilities and calling it a feature (popup blocking, IE's blocking of their own Active Content components), maybe there's a future for text-only browsing after all.