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Mozilla Firefox 1.0 Release Makes Evening News in Denmark

Speaker: The software giant Microsoft gets unexpectedly hard competition. A new and free internet program has begun to conquer the market. The program called Mozilla Firefox is a so-called internet browser, used for watching homepages. In less than a year the program has reached a world market share of 6 percent.

Mads Dydensborg, Institute of Datalogy, Copenhagen University: It's faster, it's simpler, and... it can do everything, really. I can't see any reason for using Internet Explorer, actually.

Speaker: Microsoft's browser, Internet Explorer, ousted its hardest competitor, Netscape, some 7 years ago. And has since then dominated almost totally — until now! Mozilla derives from Netscape, and a trial version has been downloaded by 8 million people. The final version was released today.

Mogens Kühn Pedersen, professor of Informatics, Copenhagen Business School: It is a very well designed browser, it's super fast. I've tested it for some hours, and I've tested it on some of the pages that up to now have been hard to render for alternatives to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. And I've found that Firefox is capable of resolving some of these problems.

Speaker: The manufacturer of Mozilla isn't a company, but a foundation, committed to making free and secure software.

Tester: I think — as an ordinary computer user — that Mozilla Firefox in some ways is an incredibly smart tool. It is, for instance, capable of collecting news from the internet all by itself. The program is simple and easy to install, and it renders most homepages super fast and flawlessly. But there's some homepages that is renders very badly, and that is not so smart.

Speaker: The problem is that many homepages have been designed [specifically] to Microsoft's browser.

This is a translated transcript of a news report from Danish television channel TV2. The original report can be viewed online (Windows Media Video format).

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