Comment by linguae

This was a problem during the early 2000s when Windows and Internet Explorer were utterly dominant. Some banks, government services, and other essential websites used ActiveX controls, preventing access by non-Windows users. I remember during my senior year of high school being unable to fill out a college financial aid application circa late 2004 or early 2005 on my PC running FreeBSD and Firefox; I needed to use Windows and Internet Explorer.

I remember the stagnation of Internet Explorer combined with increased awareness of security exploits in Windows and Internet Explorer led to the rise of Mozilla Firefox and (to a lesser extent) increased marketshare for the Mac. This, combined with the arrival of smartphones around 2007, put pressure on organizations to make their Web sites accessible to a wider range of browsers instead of just IE.

Perhaps if we had a critical mass of people using phones with FOSS software, this would be enough for banks and other organizations to consider people who don’t use Apple/Google products.

The challenge, though, is getting that critical mass. Firefox benefitted from Microsoft’s fumbles in the 2000s. It’s going to be hard for a FOSS project to compete head-on against Apple and Google.