Where does Mozilla go when the monopoly witch is dead? So what would Mozilla do if it ever won? The question, which The Register asked of Mozilla Foundation head Mitchell Baker a couple of weeks ago, may be slightly premature, but Mozilla most certainly isn't losing, and The Beast, while still gripping hold of a goodly chunk of the browser market, is bloodied and reeling. Scarcely …
I have both Google and Wordpress (and probably other) OpenIDs. It would be interesting if Firefox could have built-in authentication for any site that required sign-in, with one username if you wanted it, linked to several email addresses or account but just one person: ME.
I can not believe the stupity of those who think that the toy in the happy meal is free.
It is not. IE is not free. It is part of the $200 or so you pay.
Just because the use of IE has dropped does not mean that consumers are not illegally forced to continue to purchase IE. It is illegal in the US. And it should be illegal in the EU.
Clearly the EU commission wants all consumers to continue paying for IE. That is a huge mistake on their part. The US DOJ wants that too even though the appellate courts decided that commingling the code was in fact illegal. MS even appealed that specific issue to the US Supreme Court and they denied the appeal.
The monopoly is not over until consumers can save $35 for not taking IE home.
I am the same way..I also run a network of 800 or so computers, and have no issues with it. I can manage it via Group Policy, i can install plugins....it's easy to use and manage. What more could I ask for?
Oh, do I need to mention the security problems that Firefox has TOO? It's not like they are perfect...
Agree with Ben and AC.
Sandboxing, plug-in support, updates via WSUS and GPO management makes IE a winner in the enterprise. Better management than the competition, users know it, has a big enough market share to ensure 99% of sites work in it and the security of it on Vista/7 with UAC IMHO puts it on par with the rest of the browsers out there.
Nothing against FF, Opera or Chrome (Safari is a different matter), but for enterprise deployments IE is in a league of it's own.
From a personal POV the alternatives don't add anything for me that I don't get with IE (use the IEPro plugin in IE8 on Win7), so I use that at home as well. (standard interface between home and work that way too)
Each to their own, but I think a few vocal people have their heads stuck in the sand. Windows is reliable, IE is secure* and Microsoft aren't that bad.
In the same way that Linux is usable, alternative browsers won't cause half the web to stop working for you and FOSS isn't the command line/only rough round the edges software it used to be.
This isn't 1999 anymore people!
IE is a perfectly reasonable choice now-a-days
First of all, the default Firefox UI on Windows 7 sucks big time. I have to install three or four add-ons to make it anywhere near as good as IE8 or Google Chrome.
Secondly, there is no Protected Mode or Sandbox feature, unlike IE8 or Google Chrome.
Thirdly, smooth-scrolling in Firefox is awful.
Fourthly, it takes too long to start.
I may give it another shot when they come up with the revamped UI.
I think what AC and Ben Lambert need is an active "icon" (Silverlight, natch) which rolls out to roughly 1.5 x fullscreen whenever your pointer goes within a country mile of it and is basically an interactive advert for good old Microsoft.
The rest of us need an astroturf icon.
Thank you!
Is it becuase someone doesn't like something you do like that means they're astroturfing, or just becuase they like something made by MS? Personaly I've gone through various browsers and have sort of stagnated on Opera, but if I were running a Windows network of more than a few machines I'd probably opt for IE as well, mainly for the reasons stated above (group policy control etc). Does this make me an astro turfer as well?
Expressing a coherent opinion with a modicum of logical argumentation means you're not in the astroturf camp. Try again: your options are more CAPS, spurious and hilariously incomprehensible claims (e.g., firefox interface is by default unusable, whereas clearly fantastic experiences follow a browser they stopped development on for years and then took about a decade after opera to copy tabbed browsing), whatever --- be creative!
Personally wouldn't use the word without first deciding the comment in question has a particularly high marketroid score, which is the case for both of these posts - they're off the scale. Granted, Ben Lambert's probably wasn't (he just looks like that rarest of beings - a true believer) but the original AC comment stinks of marketing in both form and content. I'm paraphrasing slightly here, but "if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it might as well be a duck".
May I ask _why_ you won't touch FF with a bargepole? Do you have a reason you can share?
I'm painfully aware of the problems with using it in a corporate environment that Ben mentions. I wish Mozilla would solve those properly so that we can have more choice in business spaces too, but for home use I personally find FireFox to be much more pleasant to use.
make up their minds when it comes to Firefox / IE market share, i constantly see these figures tilted in one direction or the other by as much as 25% depending on the needs of the story... this week firefox has only 25% market share, last week they had just a tad short of 50%! did IE suddenly grow in popularity (again)?
Or did you carefully choose the statistics that best fit your agenda, john?
Well, if I'd been selecting stats to fit my agenda, I'd surely have chosen the 50 per cent one. It seems to me the browser wars are pretty much done and dusted, but if Microsoft still has over 60 per cent and the only competitor with a credible share has about 25, maybe they're not.
Which is a pity, because it's really time we got to move on.
1) What MS proved at least was the theory, that a (near) monopoly stalls innovation. At the highest point of IE marketshare, the MS IE team was cut back dramatically.
2) Enterprises use IE6 based apps a lot and due to incompatibility with IE7 and IE8 these apps will stay for a long time. To be fair, the effort to be more compliant with stadards made MS a better citizen, but broke many Enterprise applications on the other side.
Too bad.....
Firefox has gotten so crappy of late with memory leaks and hanging etc., I am now sure that Steve Ballmer has sent a few dozen of his most expert of programmers over to Mozilla a few years back, to help Mozilla improve the Firefox "user experience".
- While still on the Microsoft Payroll..................
A simple search like:
"Firefox is shit" - proves it.
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