Browser wars, Darwinism, and the SlashDot effect.
<whinge_and_rant>
Gar! Fnark!
God damnit. Stupid people make me so angry sometimes.
It all started when Peter Torr posted on his blog about an installer issue. It was quite long,and talked about the trustworthiness of the Firefox installer.
I took it for what it was. A (slightly) tongue in cheek look at what happened when he installed Firefox (a supposedly much more secure browser) on his machine. He pointed out a few things, took a couple of things to extremes, but basically all he was saying is that for a general dumb user (which is most of those non-geeks out there), it could quite easily have been a peice of malware that was installed instead. He wasn't knocking the browser (as such), just the install process.
I admit to taking a childish delight in seeing the biggest competitor to my favourite browser taking a hit (I'm the first to crow loudly when I hear of a security flaw in Firefox), but he was really making only a small and valid point.
And he never said 'Microsoft has never made the same mistake'.
A lot of people talked about it in the blogosphere today. The one that caught my attention the most was by Frans Bouma. In his blog post, he talked about how it was Darwin in full effect because having someone deny things adamantly only pushes people to the other side in the end.
The thing that strikes me is the level to which Frans went to to make his point. Surely, in the same post as what he wrote, he's basically worked against himself by making his own post an example of the Darwin thing too?
I rarely say this publically about other bloggers, but - dude, you're an idiot. Oh, and by the way, you're first line? 'Peter Torr did spend a lot of time to tell the world why he doesn't trust Firefox as a browser.' Did you read his post? He only talked about the installer - not the browser.
Peter just now gave an update on how things have gone since he made his initial post. He's been inundated with comments, the likes of which hasn't been since the last time SlashDot wankers hit a blog.
It never fails to amaze me at the sort of bullshit that comes out of your standard slashdotters mouth.
I was quite sure right from the start that Peter was simply trying to raise a real concern. He never said IE was perfect, just that in this case the version with XP SP2 does it better.
What's the big deal?
On Frans' post, Scott Galloway even made the comment 'Why don't MS just accept that IE has exceeded it's life expectancy, it's little palm-crystal has turned red and it's time to fry that thing'. I subscribe to Scotts blog, I have nothign against what he says, or against him. But seriously - come on.
I just wish all of you would quite your whinging.
Some people prefer IE. Surely that's ok?
Some people prefer Firefox. Surely that's ok too?
I think that Martin Luther King should be brought back to life so he can fight for the rights of equality and try to stop the bigotry. But instead of fighting for the black rights, he needs to fight for equal browser rights.
Me, I prefer IE. But I work with it, and it's the only target browser for applications that I have to write at work. And I just plain prefer it. I hate tabbed browsing. I don't like the Firefox 'look'. I don't care that my CSS box model is screwed.
Bugs in IE annoy me. But I don't know of any programs that don't have bugs.
If you want to run Firefox, that's fine. Really. I don't care. But why should you stick your choices down my throat? I don't stick mine down yours (I insult Forefox users, but that's only fun, I don't actually mean it.)
I also hate Acrobat, and the whole PDF file format. Why aren't people making a big hoorah about some PDF replacement? No one got outraged at the fact that I prefer Winamp to Media Player. No comment gets made about the fact that I prefer ICQ to Messenger, or Kazaa to Napster (do either of them still work? :) What's it frickin matter which browser I use?
But a concern is a concern. The installer for Firefox could probably work better. I don't care if MS have done just as bad in the past, they're trying to do better now. If someone non-microsoft had said the installer could do better, would people have listened? My money says yes.
Just bloody get over it people.
</whinge_and_rant>
Listening to: crawling - linkin park - (3:28)