Slashdot Mirror
Gartner Says it's a 2-Browser World
prostoalex writes "In its advisory to the IT managers Gartner says that even though the factors that drive the current Firefox growth are not sustainable, IT departments better get used to a two-browser world. "Concerns about security currently favor Mozilla Foundation's Firefox, but the market tide can shift if security breaches result from increased usage of Firefox", says Gartner and ZDNet adds that "Microsoft must deliver an improved version of its browser in Longhorn if it is to "determine the outcome" of the browser war.""
Slashdot rejected this Ask Slashdot submission, everyone I've talked to says it's an excellent talking point so screw them. Please discuss:
Recently I've been trying to find a good ADSL ISP for my mother to migrate to. Her broadband provider has gone downhill rather nastily, requiring all http requests to be forced through their proxy, and tech support is £1/minute. During recent chats with people, I've mostly been given the conclusion that having ISPs offering uncapped broadband connections is ultimately unsustainable and all will be capped or PAYG in the near future. This is rather depressing, and I'd like Slashdot's thoughts on the matter. What's wrong with averaging out bandwidth costs over all users of an ISP? It seems to work OK for uncapped ISPs at the moment, and people who use the Internet just for e-mail and www don't have a massive problem paying a bit extra - on the contrary, people who use their connections a lot would have big problems if they were expected to cough up 10x more each month. I mean, what's the point in having a 10Mbit/sec connection if you're capped to 1GB/month? You'd have some trouble even streaming decent quality video, let alone doing a plethora of things that would require a lot of transfer. What's the benefit - web pages loading a few seconds faster?
I'm told that this model is unviable, not because ISPs are unable to get uncontended bandwidth from themselves to the Internet, but because of BT's side of the connection (I'm in the UK). BT's network is apparently not sufficient to cope with lots of heavy users, or they are just plain greedy, so they are beginning to charge very high prices for bandwidth. Take a look at this image, and bear in mind BT will be scrapping the 'Standard charging' option for ISPs soon.
Does this mean the best way to go is cable? They don't have the black-box infrastructure costs of BT to deal with as they run their own networks. What's the situation with uncapped ISPs in the US/Canada? Is there really a depressing future in sight where bandwidth (an abundant constantly reusable resource) is charged PAYG just like electricity (coming from scarce non-renewable resources, mainly) and other utilities?
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
the pancake ninjas are first!!
Good trolls go to the trouble of attempting good grammar and spelling. You didn't.
Opera and Firefox
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion