Is this internet prodigy about to knock Microsoft off its pedestal? Bill Gates' nightmare? FIREFOX

Times Online ^ | 01.04.05

[Last Visible Dog]

Yep, screw'em. I don't need'em.

Screw 70% of the market because you don't need them

Interesting business strategy. I will admit I don't have the luxury you have to say "screw'em" to 70% of the available market - that is why I question if you really work in the industry. I guess it is possible you work for a company that wishes to limit itself to only 30% of the available market.

[Bottom_Gun]

FireFox does have a stand alone e-mail program, called mozilla Thunderbird. I downloaded it when I down loaded FireFox, because I used to use Netscape for e-mail. Try it, it imports everything seamlessly, and I think is easier to use too. what I like is you don't have to open a browser to get e-mail!

[discostu]

I can't remember if it was up this thread or on another I said it, but I don't think IE will drop below 2/3 of the market. It's got the two most important bundles for the market: Windows, and AOL. And obviously IE isn't going to stop being bundled in Windows, and AOL never seemed to even seriously contemplate unbundling IE even after they bought Netscape (always wondered if MS paid them off somewhere in that). As long as IE keeps those bundles they will have the majority of the market, but if the other third of the market coalesces around 1 browser (which ever, doesn't matter) the industry will start having to do dual support again. Which from where I sit sucks, I hate having to test things twice, I don't like having to test our server on 2K and 2K3, and I don't want to have to start testing our web client on IE and something else. Of course if the other third of the market get spread out between 3 or more browsers coding will be able to stay IE-centric. Which, of course, was the whole goal, to functionally replace the W3C standard with a standard owned by MS, there are few things in this world Bill Gates hates more than popular standards controlled by somebody else.

[Last Visible Dog]

Just not using it as your browser will not protect you from its security flaws. It's used by many other applications and Windows itself which give you exposure to varying degrees (heavy exposure if you use Outlook).

Let me get this straight - you are claiming that if you use say FireFox - you are still vulnerable to IE hacks while you are browsing with FireFox.

Yeah. Right.

[Last Visible Dog]

They pay for content that can be rendered on their browsers. If that means it takes me more time because of IE's poor CSS support, or if I just don't make the site as good as I could have because I've dumbed-down the CSS for IE, then fine -- they're paying for it.

What happened to your "screw'em" strategy?

[Last Visible Dog]

I don't think IE will drop below 2/3 of the market. It's got the two most important bundles for the market: Windows, and AOL

Good point.

As long as IE keeps those bundles they will have the majority of the market, but if the other third of the market coalesces around 1 browser (which ever, doesn't matter) the industry will start having to do dual support again

Very true! If the market demands it - businesses will do it.

Which, of course, was the whole goal, to functionally replace the W3C standard with a standard owned by MS, there are few things in this world Bill Gates hates more than popular standards controlled by somebody else.

Right on.

[antiRepublicrat]

What happened to your "screw'em" strategy?

Okay, I'll type this real slow-like this time so you can read it. You have one more chance to show me you are capable of comprehending English:

I'm talking about personal sites that I don't make money off of, and mainly my friends (who are smart enough not to use IE) will be visiting. People I don't know who are using IE, yeah, screw'em. It's not costing me anything and lets me use all the cool CSS stuff that IE chokes on.

Are you good now or are you going to take time off from the WWW for a grade-school English refresher?

[antiRepublicrat]

Let me get this straight - you are claiming that if you use say FireFox - you are still vulnerable to IE hacks while you are browsing with FireFox.

I don't know. Do you have Outlook open in the background?

[clyde asbury]

How many email accounts are you working with?

I don't know about only one account to send messages - it could be. I have more than one address, but they're all under one account.

Others have said that T-bird is slow. They must mean slow in sending, because mine is fine on receiving for my personal account, but it may be slow with large volumes.

[Terpfen]

Yeah, old thread, I know, but I wanted to say this much; the Justice Department's problem with IE was that it became integrated into the operating system. And they were right: just because you don't have IE open doesn't mean it isn't running. If you bring up the task manager, you'll see explorer.exe--the IE system shell. You can't shut it down, because it's necessary to run everything from your taskbar on up. Every time you open My Computer or the Control Panel, you're loading it in an IE window.

One major reason Windows is insecure is because IE has become Windows.

[Paridel]

I'd like to try firefox but I don't want two browsers as I like a "lean" computer... I also want to keep my active desktop.

I know that you have probably already received a reply to this, but having two, three, or even ten browsers on your computer isn't really going to effect how it runs at all.

Firefox is about 15MB (installed), IE is probably a little more than that, but in the same ballpark.

I'm not sure about you, but my computer has 700GB (real GB, not in powers of ten) of hard drive space. That is 734 million MBs. A more realistic number is probably 40GB, but we are still talking about tens of millions of megabytes of storage space. The space taken up by Firefox or IE is negligible.

That is really all the browser is costing you. It doesn't use up system resources while it isn't running.

I have had to help friends on several occasions fix their computers because they tried to "clean them up" and ended up deleting important system files. However they keep doing so because they are of a similar mindset, that somehow these programs are cluttering up their computer and adversely effecting its performance. But the truth is it isn't that big of a deal.

It is important to computer performance to have adulate free hard drive space on your computer, and to have your hard drive defragmented so that files are laid out in an efficient manor when your computer needs to access them. Neither of these things should require that you skimp on having useful applications installed on your machine.

I would say that there is nothing to lose in your trying out Firefox. You can keep your active desktop and use Firefox (if you want) for most of your browsing, and IE when you need or want to, and there is no problem with that at all.

Applications are simply tools, and some are better suited for different tasks than others. I personally have several hundreds of them installed that I have picked up (and in many cases written) to perform various tasks over the years. There are some that I don't need very often, but when I do it is nice to have them. As long as you obtain them legally and don't have them running all the time there is no downside to having more any more than there is a downside to having a bunch of word documents sitting on your computer.

-paridel

[Paridel]

No, IE is the majority browser. It is not the standard.

And yes, whether we like it or not, that makes it the de facto standard. When my grandmother loads an website she isn't going to care if the W3C or anyone else approved it or not, just whether or not it works.

When I develop for public business I use a subset of CSS that IE can understand, kind of like tying my wings... When I develop personally, I use the full features of CSS, screw anyone stupid enough to use such an outdated, incompatible browser.

Personally when I develop websites I try to balance making it look decent on as many peoples machines as possible with the time involved in doing so. So sure, there is a small subset of people using very old (3.0 series browsers) that probably have a hard time seeing what I have put up, but I don't go out of my way to ostracize anyone.

CSS is simply another tool to aid web developers, a very nice one, but there is nothing that it provides that is worth excluding people that might be interested in reading what I write. I thought the entire purpose of a website was to provide content, not to showcase how little bits of code can do cool things with colors or fonts.

It seems like you are letting something silly like small amount of browser incompatibility obscure the real reason you have a website. I have lots of people read stuff I put up who are from various walks of life who know nothing about browser incompatibilities and don't really care. Why should I make my aunt or friend majoring in history jump through hoops to view my content. CSS, HTML, or whatever technology you use is a means to an ends, not an ends unto itself.

The Internet is supposed to be an enabling technology. I don't care if it is MS, Open Source developers, or anyone else, doing something that makes it harder for the average individual to read content with their software of choice is backwards. You and I may be technically elite but we shouldn't presuppose that anyone else is.

-paridel

[Paridel]

adulate free hard drive space

Ah yes, that free hard drive space needs to feel very well loved or it will act up ;-).

I think I need to be a little more careful with the fr spell checker in the future.

-paridel

[mdittmar]

Thanks.

[antiRepublicrat]

So sure, there is a small subset of people using very old (3.0 series browsers) that probably have a hard time seeing what I have put up, but I don't go out of my way to ostracize anyone.

Righting along with your reasoning, there is a subset (although not small) of people that probably have a hard time seeing what I have put up for personal pages. And I don't care. Anybody I do care about uses a decent browser like Firefox, Opera or Safari.

The Internet is supposed to be an enabling technology.

I have to admit that's part of the reason I do this. I have a problem when any company can reduce the abilities of the WWW in general (in a "de-facto standards" way) just because they don't want to make their browser standards-compliant. It's effort to try to "smarten-up" at least a small corner of the WWW.