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

In article <O8KdnRrif94RrSXenZ2dnUVZ_tSdnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Bill Todd <billtodd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>> In article <seKdnZwmQP1shiXeRVn-jQ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
>> Bill Todd <billtodd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>>
>>>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
>>
>>
>> How many Linux users are there worldwide? Heck, they even have a
>> marketing branch (which is more than VMS has, but that's another
>> story). Who is winning the desktop? Linux or Windows?
>
> What part of the fact that Linux *still* doesn't directly compete with
> Windows as a desktop OS (though it's coming closer and closer to
> becoming a competitor) has managed to escape you?

It competes as much as any non-commercial product can be said to
compete. All of the major distributions offer all the same tools
as Windows and include a desktop installation option. Linuxoids
spend most of their time and breath talking about how they are
the alternative to Windows.

> And what relevance
> does Linux have to a specifically Web-based issue like this one in the
> first place?

The issue was wether or not a handfull of squeeky wheels could force
web content providers to stop writing code specific to Windows. Linux
is more than a handful/ It is hundreds of thousands if not millions
of anti-Windows users. And their impact on Microsoft has been negligible
at best.

>
> Linux is still basically a 'techie' OS with a small (though growing)
> cadre of early non-techie adopters which some distributions are catering
> to.

Bull. Linux stopped being "techie" at least as far back as the the
first serious RedHat offering. And maybe before that. Ygdrasil had
a "pop it in the drive" nearly automatic install. Today you have
even more simple "just boot me" installs. Maybe you need to get out
more. There are Linux desktop installs that are easier, require less
interaction and even require less knowledge than Windows.

> By contrast, Firefox is definitely mainstream:

It won't be mainstream till it comes already installed in a desktop
system. Until then it is just another third party add-on.

> fully competitive
> with IE and often superior, but without IE's glass jaws (and even if
> Firefox has some of its own, until the hacking community actually
> attacks them with the ferocity it demonstrates toward IE Firefox will
> remain a significantly safer option to use).

And as long as web content providers continue to specificly target their
web sites at IE it will continue to be a wannabe.

>
>>
>>
>>> (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).
>>
>>
>> Bad example. Itanic was a mistake from the beginning.
>
> And IE wasn't? Perhaps you need to study browser history a bit more
> closely.

Don't understand that one. IE was just another browser in the beginning.
Except it had the backing of the most powerful desktop OS inthe world
and was integrated and automatically installed. It worked just as well
as any other browser. It even had it's ancestery deep int he same roots.
It was never the outsider so it always had the upper hand. Itanic was
the outsider from the beginning when it was made blatantly obvious that
it was not going to be compatable with it's predecessor. If IE had been
written to use some other presentation language than HTML, then it would
have failed and been just like the Itanic. But at this point, IE is the
"industry standard" and it doesn't matter if they handle W3C code just
find, all the others are the outsiders.

>
> The main difference between IE and Itanic was Microsoft's ability to
> leverage its OS dominance (plus its 'integration' of IE with the OS) to
> get IE into virtually every PC user's system.
>
> Let's consider ourselves fortunate that it was not feasible to bundle
> Itanic into every IA32 chip.

True. If the Itanic had not been totally incompatable with the x86
family it probably would have been a raging success.

>
> ...
>
>>>Web browsing is a situation where 1) a large percentage of individuals
>>>have a free choice in what to use,
>>
>>
>> No, they don't.
>
> I guess you have difficulty appreciating the difference between 'a large
> percentage' and 'a vast majority' - though of course you haven't even
> managed to refute that latter and much stronger statement.
>
> Over 10% of Web accesses *already* come from Firefox, plus a few percent
> more from other non-IE alternatives.

Read what I said, How many come from home and how many come from
business. Like it or not, business is still where the money is and
business continues to dictate what will be the standard. Sadly, even
when said business is heavily reliant on home users, like a university.

> And that's only an absolute lower
> bound on the percentage of people with the option to dump IE: given
> human ignorance and laziness, suggesting that the actual percentage is
> not far higher (even if which side of 50% is not clear) is silly.
>
>> What they use (outside of their house) is dictated by
>> corporate policy on the part of both the browser and the content side.
>
> Even in cases where this is true (and of course not all businesses have
> any such policy), some businesses have already opted for alternatives to IE.

I don't have numbers to refute you. I do know that if you count the
government in the catagory of business systems the number with a "no
rogue programs" rule is extremely high and going higher every day.
Nice idea if it's true, but, sadly, that has not been my experince.
Like many people who post here have alredy said numeroud times, I find
more and more sites where non-IE browsers just don't work at all or if
they do, they perform so bad as to be unusable. I can not think of any
(OK, there used to be one site, but I don't think it is still around and
it was deliberate) where other browsers work but IE does not.

>
> ...
>
>> If the sites you have to access (we're not talking about google, ebay
>> or yahoo) only work with IE, then you have to use IE.
>
> You have yet to demonstrate that any significant percentage of sites
> that any major percentage of users 'have to access' 'only work with IE'.
> And since in my own experience that assertion is complete rubbish, at
> least *some* kind of substantiation would seem to be required.

Don't know how to prove it to you. Everyone here at this University must
use IE to get the job done. The web based mailer fails often with other
browsers. The frontend to all our Oracle stuff (school records, grades,
classlists) fails often with other browsers. The employee time input
system does not work with anything but IE. None of this is locally
written, we use a package provided by a company that sells this same
package to lot's of people. What can I tell you? You have been lucky.
But my point was that this is a (somewhat) recent development the
standard browser here used to be Netscape and support was "officially"
provided for things like Opera and Mozilla. Today, IE is the only
supported browser at the University. If you have a problem accessing
anything provided by the Universities web pages (not to include the
web server in my department) the forst corrective action offered is
"Use IE." If it doesn't work with IE then and only then will they
even investigate the problem.

>
> Most people will
>> not want to have to jump back and forth between different browsers
>> depending on which site they visit. And we won;t even go into the
>> potential problems one can create by installing one of these other
>> browsers.
>
> Why not? Because you can't document them? I have encountered no
> side-effects whatsoever from my Firefox installation.
>
>> I used to be a big supporter of Opera. Until it broke
>> MS updates :-( leaving me with a vulnerable machine that couldn't
>> be fixed without a reinstall because no matter what I did I could not
>> make IE my default browser again in order for MS updates to work again.
>
> I've certainly had no problem updating without making IE my default
> browser (with Firefox as the default), but given my trust in Microsoft I
> update by manually firing up IE to visit the update site rather than
> automatically so I suppose that could make a difference. That, in fact,
> is the *only* situation is which I ever use IE any more.
>
> ...
>
>>>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).
>>
>>
>> It has never been BG's desire to abide by standards. I see no reason why
>> that would change as long as he is on top. And I see no likelihood of his
>> being toppled anytime soon.
>
> So what? BG isn't the one making decisions on how to structure sites
> around the Web: the most he can do is try to entice those who are to
> use non-standard techniques, and that practice is fading fast.

Keep telling yourself that.

>
> He may have had a chance to smother Java back in its infancy, in which
> case ActiveX might have held a firmer grip on the industry. But that
> opportunity is long gone - and now no Web site designer *needs* anything
> non-standard that IE has to offer.

That's right. And no Web site designer needs Java either. But the
web is loaded with it. Just because they don't have to write to MS's
standard doesn't mean they aren't doing it.

Like I said, I would love to see MS dry up and blow away. But I am not
going to hold my breath waiting for it. And I am not going to do what
one person suggested and install a version of Windows without IE even
included.

bill

--
Bill Gunshannon | de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n. Three wolves
bill@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx | and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton |
Scranton, Pennsylvania | #include <std.disclaimer.h>
.

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