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Firefox Slides, IE Gains?
limber writes "InformationWeek is reporting that a Dutch Web metrics company is stating that Microsoft's Internet Explorer has gained market share, contrary to other recent studies, while Firefox has lost market share, during the last two months. 'People are not switching so often to Firefox as before,' said Niels Brinkman, co-founder of OneStat."
...which means that all those new computer sold to students are using IE. Not all those students are migrating to FF.
Every new computer that runs Windows is a new IE user. Not so for Firefox or any other browser. Nothing to see here. Move on.
if anything, I'm an old school netscape fanboy. My first browser was Lynx, then I eventually jumped on the bandwagon and got netscape 3, then eventually moved on to long lasting netscape 4.x series. Netscape 6 sucked so I stayed with netscape 4.x during that time. I eventually starting using the Mozilla suite pre 1.0 after stumbling upon it. The lack of AOL branding at the time was a major reason for my jump from Netscape proper. Since then I've been using Mozilla, then Phoneix, then Firebird, then eventually Firefox. When 1.5 came out, it really sucked major ass for me. FF1.5 would crash at least 7 to 10 times per day. I'm fairly computer savy and I followed explicit instructions on making sure it was a clean install. I was browsing with hardly any extensions at all, which sucked.
There have been other major changes behind the scenes that might not be so apparent to the average user. In my attempts to create an extension for FF1.5 extension contest I came accross a shitload of bugs. Very simple XUL markup could make the browser disappear by simply clicking on a hyperlink. And by disappear I mean as in invisibile, except for plain text. And there are others, but my attempts at using Bugzilla have sucked. I've reported bugs in the past only to have them recently deleted because no one want's to fix them.
OSS is fine, but it seems to foster a mentality that if a developer can't reproduce a bug then the end user must be stupid. That's annoying, especially for a company that's marketing its browser to everyone, including urging people that don't know what a browser even is to upgrade.
The feeling I've gotten from this open source netscape project is that I'm using a product, such that if it ever gives me serious problems, I'm left with no recourse since there is no focused method for attaining a definitive solution or fix for something. It's like the bystander effect when it comes to fixing or even acknowleding problems.
Phase 2: Right click FF icon --> properties --> change icon --> select IE icon
Phase 3: Delete old IE Icon from desktop
Phase 4: Rename Mozilla Firefox icon to Internet Explorer
Before you mod this funny, I have done this to at least half a dozen people's computers. They arn't smart enough to realize the difference (all they need is an address bar and bookmarks), so FF stays. Their computers get less spyware, they see less popups, I get less "OMG HELP ME" calls. Which brings me to Phase 5, which is profit.
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