Slashdot Mirror
World Firefox Day
kbrosnan writes "Are you a fan of Firefox? Want to spread the word to a friend who hasn't heard of it yet? If you can convince just one person to switch to Firefox before September 15th, you'll both be immortalized in Firefox 2.0's source code."
Netscape was good, or at lest the best of the day. It ran on every obscure platform under the sun. It was like java before even java. Runs and is able to be debugged and crashed everywhere.
I've heard from Netscape developers that the highlight was when they realized they were _the_ browser for the web, and they were seeing web addresses (complete with the http:/// part on them) on the side of trucks and all that. I also heard that the secretary is quite wealthy now due to stock options, the whole nine yards.
Well, they stagnated. And IE came and IMNSHO, ruined the web experience in the late 90s to early 00s. And during that time Netscape released their code into the Mozilla project. It then got worse. AOL bought Netscape, and Netscape is just a memory.
But then, guess what happened?
Because of the open code and open standards, we got the web back! My browser of choice is Safari. I really like it. It does almost 100% of what I think a browser should do. And it too is based on open standards and OSS (KHTML), and Apple has given patches back to the KHTML people.
And then Mozilla grew into Firefox, and things are getting better on the web again. I recently ran into two websites that required IE. One was for my taxes, and I told them that sure this time I can use IE on the Mac, but IE on the Mac is dead and if they want my business, they need to support standards. At work, there is one system that requires IE _on windows_, and we had to get a new computer, with windows just to view one website, and I had a word or two with them. And guess what? They told me that they are now targeting Firefox as the target browser, and for that to be cross platform.
Hey, as sucky as IE was, it did help the scene a little bit. It focused the other guys to care about security and for standards compliance, and today I have a number of good choices for browsing the web on a number of platforms, and its getting better every day.
Thank you Mozilla team, and thank you Microsoft.
It was a joke.
Although Gentoo users will experience bigger downloads.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say