FOR Microsoft’s many critics, there are few better illustrations of the company’s baleful influence than the story of Internet Explorer.

Ten years ago, millions of people were discovering the internet for the first time, thanks to Netscape Navigator, a pioneering web browser made available free.

By the time Microsoft woke up to this new phenomenon, with the launch of Internet Explorer (IE) in 1996, Netscape was being used by almost three-quarters of all web users.

Microsoft started late but it had one huge advantage. It tightly integrated IE into its dominant Windows operating system, thereby forcing the adoption of its browser by computer makers and consumers.

Within a year, Microsoft had grabbed a 40% market share. By 1999, IE had twice as many users as Netscape Navigator, and by 2001 all meaningful competition had been vanquished.

Microsoft is proud of its record of innovation but since 2001 there has been no new version of IE. When technology is moving so fast, this is remarkable — and, for the critics, it is a clear sign that Microsoft is as likely to be a barrier to innovation as it is an instigator.

Over the past six months, Microsoft’s IE has once again been losing share to a new generation of rivals, and particularly to Firefox, a browser that is reckoned to be faster, with better features and — perhaps most important — offers better protection against viruses and other internet threats.

Since its launch last November, Firefox has been downloaded more than 25m times.

Figures published last week by Net Applications, a Californian web-monitoring firm, suggested that IE’s market share had now fallen back below 90%. Firefox is steadily gaining month by month, and is now up to 6.2%.

This may substantially understate the actual and potential popularity of Firefox, and of other new browsers such as Deepnet Explorer, the product of a small London firm.

Many people use the internet at work, and most companies will inevitably be set up to use Microsoft and IE. But XiTi, a French monitoring company, recently found that 12.2% of French internet users, 10.9% of those in Britain and 21.4% in Germany were now using Firefox away from work at weekends.

These figures give some idea of the scale of the demand for a better product. Microsoft has recognised that threat, and recently brought forward its plans for the next version of IE.

Firefox was developed by the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit spin-off from the moribund Netscape, which was bought by AOL. The browser includes a built-in pop-up blocker. It also features tabbed browsing, allowing users to keep several web pages open at any one time.

Firefox also protects your computer from “malware”, malicious programmes that can corrupt the proper functioning of the machine. The greater security and better features of the Firefox browser have been enthusiastically embraced. In December thousands of Firefox fans around the world paid $250,000 for a double-page ad in the New York Times.

Britain’s contender in the browser wars has yet to build up this degree of momentum and support. However, some reviewers have suggested that Deepnet Explorer, set up by Yurong Lin, is even better than Firefox. The biggest advance claimed by Deepnet is that its browser will defend the user against “phishing” scams — where crooks pose as banks or other legitimate organisations in an attempt to procure credit- card and other personal details.

Like Firefox, Deepnet offers tabbed browsing and a pop-up killer. It also has a news reader, which brings news feeds to the browser without the user having to visit every site he or she is interested in.

More controversially, Deepnet Explorer incorporates a peer-to-peer file-sharing facility, using the Gnutella network.

Deepnet — like Netscape — faces the problem of how to make the business pay. But after more than 600,000 downloads, Lin believes Deepnet Explorer has a chance to carve out a niche for itself. “I don’t think we can overthrow Microsoft,” he said. “But there are hundreds of millions of web users, and a demand for a secure browser. And a browser cannot be secure without anti-phishing.”

To try Firefox, you need to download the software from www.mozilla.org/products/firefox. To try out Deepnet Explorer, visit the site www.deepnetexplorer.com/download.asp