Posted on 12/22/2004 8:32:38 AM PST by holymoly
Remember those days back in 1995, when Netscape Navigator was synonymous with internet? That was the time when Microsofts Internet Explorer entered the market for a head-on collision with the Netscape Navigator. That was Browser War I. Now the battle was reignited by the fire of FireFox, internet browser of Mozilla. This is the beginning of the Browser War II. And it appears that this time Microsoft is losing it.
Internet Explorer is rapidly losing market share. OneStat.com a company in Amsterdam had conducted a worldwide survey in late November. The survey shows that Internet Explorer's share dropped to less than 89 percent, 5 percentage points less than in May. FireFox now has almost 5 percent of the market, and it is growing.
Net surfers are opting for FireFox to Internet Explorer due to security concerns. FireFox offers much more security from worms and viruses than IE. FireFox 1.0 was released for free on the web on Nov. 9. Within just one month 10 million copies of the browser were downloaded. It is an open source software which improves with time as bug-reporter and bug-fixer community grows.
Mozillas President Mitchell Baker is optimistic that FireFox will grab 10 percent market share and Mozilla's many technology parts will become an increasingly important application development platform.
She says that the product is so nice that people love it when they try it. It is innovative and has new features, it makes the Web a more enjoyable experience, it makes people more comfortable, and it's fast. It's a set of things you would want in a browser if you sat down and really thought about it. She added that people rarely realize that the quality your web experience is determined to a large extent by the kind of browser you use. Firefox gives them that wonderful browsing enjoyment.
Gary Schare, Microsoft's director of product management for Windows on the other hand feels that people will stick with IE when they consider all the things that made them to opt for IE in the first place. He said that Microsoft is developing a new version of browser but one will have to wait till 2006. Schare said that Microsoft goes to people and gets there feedback on what they want and what they dont want in a product. It is not so easy to satisfy absolutely everyone.
To us however somehow the diminishing share of IE from the market says something else. It says that nowadays costumers have a new way of giving a feedback. They just switch to someone else.
I read it, I see, guess it's time to sell my Microsoft huh?
And IE sux rocks.
IE is free, ain't that right? IE5.5 came with Winduhs ME, and I never paid for IE6. In fact, they force it on you when you buy certain software. HP blessed me with an iE6 disc with my scanner. MS themselves sent me an unsolicited "butterfly" CD in the mail, with IE6 on it. If I want to use MSN I also have to use that free iE6 upgrade, how about that?
There's no escaping your precious Master's code.
MS is so "superior" in how they force you into OS upgrades under the guise of security. And next week MS will be issuing other patches to patch the patches that were patched....
Get an extension called "Tabbrowser Extensions" and another called "Tabbrowser Preferences".
Between the two of them, there isn't a tab option left that you can't configure.
Ctrl-T (or just click the button).
Best. Feature. Ever.
Did you not know that those danged pinkos at MS have issued a popup blocker in IE6 SP2?
A few ads are tolerated, but who gives anyone permission to pop up unsolicited windows on my machine without my permission?
By your analogy, should I have been imprisoned as a child for going to the bathroom when a commercial came on TV?
Why don't I let just anyone in my house to flip light switches or control any other aspect of my existence, because I fear being branded unAmerican otherwise?
By the way, I'm not shelling out money for another OS just to get their precious and perhaps second rate popup blocker. I'll not goose step. I'll not owe my soul to the Company Store. If you think I should, then you're more a dangerous Leftist pinko in your thought processes than a Mozilla user would ever dare be.
You could do worse than to start using linux. I am an old unix junkie and started using SuSE at about rel 6.1 (legally licensed). My HP came bundled with Xpensive and it occupies a small partition and an (unused) entry in Grub. I licensed Moneydance (about $25.00) and have no need for any M$ product or Quicken.
OpenOffice.org, tex/latex, any number of very robust spreadsheets, media players, robust SQL databases, compilers for virtually any language, and one of the best features is kshowmail, which allows me access to mail server on the ISP to delete suspect mail (needed because wifey still uses w2k.
Very serious crime, and one of which I am also guilty. Think I should turn myself in now, or wait until they come drag me away?
I'm curious about Linux, especially Knoppix. I have a burner, but am on a dialup, though.
I'm going to run ME until it's threadbare and reeks of death before I'll go with Gate's "intellectual property" crap begun with XP. If I'm good enough to give him my hard earned cash, the product is mine. The record stores and Hollyweird can do fine without this old "commie thief" as well.
I am a complete neanderthal when it comes to this but I made the switch to Firefox. It was easy and it is faster and better than IE.
Grunt.
For being on a free site, and using free speech, and free choice, to sing either the praises of Mozilla or MS, we should all hang our heads in shame and go into hiding.
Thanks for saying what I wanted to say, and expressing in better words than mine! Giving away your work voluntarily is not communism - forcing MS to give it away is. If Bill Gates only wants the software developed on his Windows OS platform to be commercial profit-making ones, he could have made it so.
But he dien't. Perhaps this should tell us something.
LOL. We suck ;)
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