Re: OT: Mozilla/Firefox (was:Re: Windoze ends year with a major cert ...)

Bill Gunshannon wrote:

....

"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot
change, the courage to change the things I can, and the
wisdom to know the difference. " - Reinhold Niebuhr

The final phrase being the crux of the matter in this case. Especially with a Web-based issue like this one, it's surprising how many people still feel that individuals can't come together and actually affect events (the perception of an unstoppable Itanic juggernaut of a few years ago comes to mind: that perception didn't just fade away on its own, nor was the fade pushed by corporate interests - even IBM was on board at the time, and Sun was only temporizing rather than in its current full-attack mode).

Web browsing is a situation where 1) a large percentage of individuals have a free choice in what to use, 2) very viable alternatives to IE exist (Firefox just being the most prominent right now: Mozilla-ne-Netscape has been around forever, and Opera - now free and without ads for personal use - for quite a while), and 3) what people use is actually visible via the stats which are accumulated and published (though which may understate the use of products like Opera which can masquerade convincingly as IE when the need arises). If ever there were an environment where a better mousetrap could flourish without massive corporate sponsorship, this is it (and that indeed seems to be occurring).

IE isn't likely to disappear, of course. But its days as a de facto standard may well already be fading or gone, with what we're currently seeing just reflecting the fact that updating *existing* sites to meet the real standards isn't that high a priority (given that other browsers don't seem to be having that much difficulty dealing with them anyway).

- bill
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