Mozilla cares about branding because they're trying to maintain a product image. They don't want people patching their code and redistributing it under their brand. Debian griped about this a lot when it came up last time, and because Mozilla stood their ground, Debian forked Firefox and called it Iceweasel.
A few months later, a Debian patch to OpenSSL was found to significantly reduce entropy, to the point where keys were easily guessable.
I think that's something everyone should think about when they blast Mozilla for their branding decisions.
I was wondering if anyone else would remember this.
Of course, Freenet had other goals. You were donating to a pool in which people (yourself included) could share files. This seems to be more for a private pool.
That's why you use encryption. Just about any online backup host that doesn't care which files you send them will work with encrypted files. Encrypt before you send it over. It's really quite simple.
You lose some degree of delta-syncing, if you're doing something like that. You obviously can't send only the changes to a file unless you're doing the encryption remotely (which has some security implications.)
My backup scheme makes use of remote and local storage: encrypted backups to a remote host, and local backups to a USB drive. This way, I keep two backups of my data--one primarily used for machine or disk failure, and one use in case disaster strikes in my area.
Or (A)do you not know that the unrighteous will not (B)inherit the kingdom of God? (C)Do not be deceived; (D)neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor [a]effeminate, nor homosexuals,
10nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will (E)inherit the kingdom of God.
Now most homophobic Christians will point out the bits in the Old Testament because the're the more common arguments, and they're also the ones which are most often taught by their pastors, but it does exist outside of the OT.
1) tabs running in separate threads shouldn't bring down the entire browser, if the application was properly designed in the first place
Correct, but the key is that applications aren't designed properly in the first place, and even when they are, they often aren't implemented correctly. Would you apply the same argument to your operating system? That properly designed processes shouldn't be able to crash the whole thing? Why bother with protecting processes, then!
2) I'm sure we'll still find plenty of ways to crash the primary process and/or cause even separately running processes to do this.
Probably. In fact, opening up Chrome and typing "about:%" in the location bar will do it quite well. Still, if we're going to protect users from bad developers, this is not a bad place to start.
It depends upon your platform, and upon whether thread creation or process creation is faster. In Microsoft-world, threads are basically free while processes take quite a bit of processing power. In current versions of Linux, processes are basically free, and you can decide which to use (threads or processes) based upon the memory concerns you mention.
I know people who have built up collections of thousands of albums. I know many people with 500+ CDs.
Incidentally, I have payed $15 per CD probably 10 times in my life. Most of the time, I get stuff cheap, either from used record stores (before they all started dying off) or from used bookstores (after.) Even retailers sell them for cheaper than that. Wal-Mart routinely has them for $10 each (or maybe that's changed, but it's pretty recent if it has.) And again, as I mentioned in my post, there are other ways to legitimately get music for cheaper than $1/track or $10/CD, even if that's your benchmark.
I'm sure it's rare. I'm absolutely positive that the people I'm talking about are exceptions to the rule and that most people would have to really try to fill out their iPods with legal music. I completely accept that. That's why I also mentioned the marketing bit. If you're comparing two mp3 players of equivalent price, and one says, "20,000 songs!" and another says, "10,000 songs!" which are you going to buy? Even if you never fill out the 10k ones, you'll probably buy the 20k one. It's hardwired into us to want more than we need, particularly for equivalent expenditures.
Of course, with iPods specifically, you're not just talking about music. The numbers they give help you get an idea of what they'll hold. They also hold video--and that eats up your space pretty quickly. They advertise 100 hours of video. That's only 50-60 movies. Lots of people have 50 DVDs in their collections*. Video downloads are cheaper per megabyte from many legitimate distributors than music. And realistically, a person will have a mix of movies and music on their iPod. All of a sudden, filling up that 80GB isn't so hard.
I'm not saying it's impossible -- I'm saying that the sheer demand for these things, and the number of them that are quite full, suggests two things: That people have an enormous appetite for music, and that a large portion -- maybe most -- of these consumers are criminals.
That's pretty fair. I have no idea how many of these devices are full, though. I have an iPhone (only 8 gigs) and it's not nearly full. But I also put hardly any of my music (100% legitimate) on there. I have gigabytes of legitimate music, if you consider ripping from CDs I own to be legal. Remember the bitrate problem, too (Apple assumes 128kbps, and plenty of people rip to twice that.)
When most of the population is declared a criminal, maybe it's not the people that need to change. Maybe it's the law.
My favorite is President Bush himself. He was asked what was on his iPod in an interview once. He mentioned the Beatles. This was before their music was available in a digital download format anywhere. Now, you and I both know that ripping from CD is almost certainly fair use--but at the time, the RIAA were trying to push the idea that ripping was also illegal (they've flip-flopped on this issue quite a bit, to be honest, and I don't know where they stand right now.) I laugh at the thought of the President of the United States of America--the office of which is supposed to faithfully execute the laws of this country--being a copyright criminal, and admitting it on national TV.
* We could start a debate on the DMCA preventing me from ripping my DVDs, but I truly don't believe that that portion of the DMCA would hold up in court on the grounds that it stifles fair use.
Of course, the real reason we are in this mess to begin with is because copyrights have been extended far beyond the 15-20 years they should be; that's only been possible because of massive bribery and corruption of Congress. Turn back the clock on copyrights and most infringement goes away automatically.
I do agree that copyright is pretty out of control, but there are also larger issues to consider. Due to the Berne Convention, the US must respect the copyright laws of other nations. Realistically, if our politicians suddenly got a clue[1] and reduced copyright back down to its original levels, corporations simply would not file for copyright in the United States anymore. They'd file in a more copyright-friendly country (possibly even moving operations over there, reducing taxable income and jobs in the US) and we'd still have to deal with the longer copyrights.
[1] That is, copyright is intended to give the author a limited amount of time to profit from his work (thus encouraging people to create) before removing the asinine notion that an idea can be owned. The original copyright length was good for its time--nowadays, it's so much easier to distribute a work that by the original intention, copyright should actually be shorter than 28 years.
Pirates are not Robin Hood - They're just people too cheap to pay for what they want and too weak to just go without it.
Apple cites an 80 gig iPod as holding 20,000 songs. At $1/song, that's $20k to fill. That's more than a year's salary, at minimum wage. And they make 160 gig iPods.
So no, it's not that they're cheap. It's that there's more available, more readily, and we have broader musical tastes -- and as a result, the perception of any one song has changed.
I don't understand the connection here. What does Apple citing an iPod as holding that many songs have anything to do with "So no, it's not that they're cheap..." And what do you mean by "the perception of any one song has changed"? I'm not being a jerk, I just truly don't get what you're trying to say.
If you're pointing out that it's unreasonable to fill 80 gigs with legitimate music, I would disagree. Plenty of people have built up rather large CD collections over the years, and putting all of that on an iPod could be realistic.
It's also marketing. That's an average of 4 megs per song. When I rip music, the songs usually come out to be twice that. But it certainly helps sales to say 20,000 songs--most people don't even realize that they'll probably never fill that up.
And none of that even begins to consider freely downloadable content, or commercial content which is cheaper than $1/song. I'm pretty sure that between the CDs I already own, freely downloadable music that I like, and my few downloaded purchases, that I could fill up 100gigs easily. All completely legitimately.
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough
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Chrome Vs. IE 8
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· Score: 1
That's a lot of bile you seem to have built up against firefox. I'm not sure most people are ready to write mozilla off just yet though.
Not the original poster, but I honestly think that Firefox is just the lesser of two evils. Ok, three evils if you include Opera (which I do use pretty regularly, but I wish that it had extension support.)
Personally, I like to use my web browser constantly - as a quick reference while running many other programs. I might have 5 files up in a text editor, 20 tabs open for quick reference in firefox, and a video or music playing at the same time. I don't have a state of the art computer, and a web browser that uses up that much ram would make my whole system slow down.
How did you deal with Firefox before 3.0 came out? You know, back when it snorted RAM like a coke addict?
Firefox' success over IE is due almost entirely to its being faster and less resource intensive, this is what people want in a browser - and it sounds like chrome fails pretty badly on this front.
That's how Firefox got its foothold. Then it got bloated, too. Then it got a little leaner.
Chrome's no messiah, but if you've got a reasonably recent computer (mine's 4 years old with 1.5GB RAM) it runs like a dream. The rendering is zippy, Javascript-heavy sites are amazingly fast, and even the UI seems snappier, despite (or perhaps because of) not using the standard Windows controls.
But it's got flaws besides using lots of RAM. The lack of extensions is going to cause a lot of people to dismiss it. Lack of skinning may turn some people off, too.
Ultimately, it's about choice. People with machines which can handle it may find Chrome to be a huge improvement. Everyone else is certainly welcome to stick with one of the other browsers. But as the older computers die away and are replaced with machines with more RAM (most machines come with 1GB standard these days, some with 2GB, and RAM's pretty cheap to add on) Chrome may well find its stride.
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough
on
Chrome Vs. IE 8
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· Score: 1
Extensions are going to be a must if Google wants Chrome to succeed. I won't use the web without NoScript, at a minimum, and I'd really like to have Adblock, too.
Sure, but that's the rub. The pay for cleaning toilets is relatively low (compared to lots of white-collar work) because anyone can do it. There's far more supply for custodial work than there is demand, and the supply and demand curve compensates.
I've been tinkering on and off with a scheme to back up my regular mail to Gmail. I encrypt the body, but not the headers. This way, if my mail host goes down, I still have easy access to my archived mail.
The biggest problem I have yet to overcome is Google's zealous spam filter. So far, I've been unable to overcome it automatically, and therefore some messages get lost unless I log into my account and mark them as "not spam."
Regardless, Google is free to the encrypted versions of my e-mail. I'm not that concerned about it.
Right. Before Windows had automatic updates, people lamented about how hard it was to get your average user to update. Would your grandmother go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com periodically if you told her to? Most probably wouldn't.
Google probably would have been smart to include this as an option on the installer, checked by default. Then again, for most home users, this is really an option which should be on by default, and at least slightly difficult to change. When the first big Chrome malware hits, we'll all be crying for updates, won't we?
I think that what really happened is that Google screwed up, copied their Google Apps license verbatim, and didn't think about the repercussions. A license like that doesn't even make sense in the context of a browser--it makes sense in the context of a service. It's a boilerplate bit of text which prevents me from successfully suing a company, say Slashdot, for publishing content I posted.
In other words, Slashdot's lawyers would laugh at me for even trying to sue Slashdot for publishing this particular post, which is copyrighted by me.
It's interesting that "legitimate" software thinks it can act like spyware and the community won't notice.
Oh for heaven's sake.
It's open source. If Google thought that people wouldn't notice spyware in there, they're pretty damned stupid. Here's a hint--it probably updates Chrome on your computer. Out of date software is a pretty big problem in the Windows world, you know.
I am with you, I will not install software that doesn't give me control over what is and where it is installed. Especially when there is no notice or ability to disable certain unwanted "features".
Now that, I can agree with. Then again, it's beta software. Today is only the second day it's been released to the public. I'm sure that, in time, these kinks will be smoothed out.
Perhaps if you have a problem with imperfect software, you shouldn't be installing betas. Of course, you probably shouldn't be installing any software, but at least you might have a legitimate complaint if it's a release rather than a pre-release.
Our society is built upon people who can't get other jobs doing the jobs that no one else wants. In this case, you'd hope that other people could be an ISP technician, but your suggestion would be impossible even if it weren't horribly elitist. With rare exception, college graduates don't want to clean toilets for a living.
Everyone's talking about lawyers and whatnot... what happened to just being polite? I guess lawyers have ruined that too.
Really, it's the law that's ruined it all. Legal bickering based on imprecise wording has effectively created an entire industry of lawyers.
Of course, getting too precise in the wording could have the same effect, as people need lawyers just to sort out what the law is actually saying. But at least we wouldn't have to worry about the law being interpreted differently based upon the judge you happen to get.
And more to the point of your post, if he's polite and the other party pulls out the big guns (a lawyer), it could all be over. Things that he says could be used against him in court, making him look like a squatter. It's kinda like a real life prisoner's dilemma.
You've really hit the nail on the head, here. I'd wager that a hefty percentage of IE users think that Internet Explorer is the Internet. They won't switch because they don't even realize that they can.
A smaller percentage probably use IE because there are still some sites which simply don't work without it, and they don't want to have to manage two browsers.
Slashdot Mirror
There was a symbol called "_NSAKEY." Microsoft denied that it had anything to do with the National Security Agency.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY
Right.
Mozilla cares about branding because they're trying to maintain a product image. They don't want people patching their code and redistributing it under their brand. Debian griped about this a lot when it came up last time, and because Mozilla stood their ground, Debian forked Firefox and called it Iceweasel.
A few months later, a Debian patch to OpenSSL was found to significantly reduce entropy, to the point where keys were easily guessable.
I think that's something everyone should think about when they blast Mozilla for their branding decisions.
I was wondering if anyone else would remember this.
Of course, Freenet had other goals. You were donating to a pool in which people (yourself included) could share files. This seems to be more for a private pool.
So we have to protect the children and outlaw this service? Is that what you're trying to say?
That's why you use encryption. Just about any online backup host that doesn't care which files you send them will work with encrypted files. Encrypt before you send it over. It's really quite simple.
You lose some degree of delta-syncing, if you're doing something like that. You obviously can't send only the changes to a file unless you're doing the encryption remotely (which has some security implications.)
My backup scheme makes use of remote and local storage: encrypted backups to a remote host, and local backups to a USB drive. This way, I keep two backups of my data--one primarily used for machine or disk failure, and one use in case disaster strikes in my area.
Not all of it. Portions of the NT also say that homosexuality is a sin.
1 Corinthians 6:9-10
Or (A)do you not know that the unrighteous will not (B)inherit the kingdom of God? (C)Do not be deceived; (D)neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor [a]effeminate, nor homosexuals,
10nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will (E)inherit the kingdom of God.
Now most homophobic Christians will point out the bits in the Old Testament because the're the more common arguments, and they're also the ones which are most often taught by their pastors, but it does exist outside of the OT.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bible_and_homosexuality#Passages_from_the_New_Testament
1) tabs running in separate threads shouldn't bring down the entire browser, if the application was properly designed in the first place
Correct, but the key is that applications aren't designed properly in the first place, and even when they are, they often aren't implemented correctly. Would you apply the same argument to your operating system? That properly designed processes shouldn't be able to crash the whole thing? Why bother with protecting processes, then!
2) I'm sure we'll still find plenty of ways to crash the primary process and/or cause even separately running processes to do this.
Probably. In fact, opening up Chrome and typing "about:%" in the location bar will do it quite well. Still, if we're going to protect users from bad developers, this is not a bad place to start.
Without this advantage... well, why use threads?
It depends upon your platform, and upon whether thread creation or process creation is faster. In Microsoft-world, threads are basically free while processes take quite a bit of processing power. In current versions of Linux, processes are basically free, and you can decide which to use (threads or processes) based upon the memory concerns you mention.
You probably got your information from someone who was unclear on the distinction :)
And because people confuse that, they tend to post misinformation.
IE8's tabs will be in separate processes despite what the grandparent said. This adds stability.
Ah, good to know. Thanks for the correction.
I know people who have built up collections of thousands of albums. I know many people with 500+ CDs.
Incidentally, I have payed $15 per CD probably 10 times in my life. Most of the time, I get stuff cheap, either from used record stores (before they all started dying off) or from used bookstores (after.) Even retailers sell them for cheaper than that. Wal-Mart routinely has them for $10 each (or maybe that's changed, but it's pretty recent if it has.) And again, as I mentioned in my post, there are other ways to legitimately get music for cheaper than $1/track or $10/CD, even if that's your benchmark.
I'm sure it's rare. I'm absolutely positive that the people I'm talking about are exceptions to the rule and that most people would have to really try to fill out their iPods with legal music. I completely accept that. That's why I also mentioned the marketing bit. If you're comparing two mp3 players of equivalent price, and one says, "20,000 songs!" and another says, "10,000 songs!" which are you going to buy? Even if you never fill out the 10k ones, you'll probably buy the 20k one. It's hardwired into us to want more than we need, particularly for equivalent expenditures.
Of course, with iPods specifically, you're not just talking about music. The numbers they give help you get an idea of what they'll hold. They also hold video--and that eats up your space pretty quickly. They advertise 100 hours of video. That's only 50-60 movies. Lots of people have 50 DVDs in their collections*. Video downloads are cheaper per megabyte from many legitimate distributors than music. And realistically, a person will have a mix of movies and music on their iPod. All of a sudden, filling up that 80GB isn't so hard.
I'm not saying it's impossible -- I'm saying that the sheer demand for these things, and the number of them that are quite full, suggests two things: That people have an enormous appetite for music, and that a large portion -- maybe most -- of these consumers are criminals.
That's pretty fair. I have no idea how many of these devices are full, though. I have an iPhone (only 8 gigs) and it's not nearly full. But I also put hardly any of my music (100% legitimate) on there. I have gigabytes of legitimate music, if you consider ripping from CDs I own to be legal. Remember the bitrate problem, too (Apple assumes 128kbps, and plenty of people rip to twice that.)
When most of the population is declared a criminal, maybe it's not the people that need to change. Maybe it's the law.
My favorite is President Bush himself. He was asked what was on his iPod in an interview once. He mentioned the Beatles. This was before their music was available in a digital download format anywhere. Now, you and I both know that ripping from CD is almost certainly fair use--but at the time, the RIAA were trying to push the idea that ripping was also illegal (they've flip-flopped on this issue quite a bit, to be honest, and I don't know where they stand right now.) I laugh at the thought of the President of the United States of America--the office of which is supposed to faithfully execute the laws of this country--being a copyright criminal, and admitting it on national TV.
* We could start a debate on the DMCA preventing me from ripping my DVDs, but I truly don't believe that that portion of the DMCA would hold up in court on the grounds that it stifles fair use.
Of course, the real reason we are in this mess to begin with is because copyrights have been extended far beyond the 15-20 years they should be; that's only been possible because of massive bribery and corruption of Congress. Turn back the clock on copyrights and most infringement goes away automatically.
I do agree that copyright is pretty out of control, but there are also larger issues to consider. Due to the Berne Convention, the US must respect the copyright laws of other nations. Realistically, if our politicians suddenly got a clue[1] and reduced copyright back down to its original levels, corporations simply would not file for copyright in the United States anymore. They'd file in a more copyright-friendly country (possibly even moving operations over there, reducing taxable income and jobs in the US) and we'd still have to deal with the longer copyrights.
[1] That is, copyright is intended to give the author a limited amount of time to profit from his work (thus encouraging people to create) before removing the asinine notion that an idea can be owned. The original copyright length was good for its time--nowadays, it's so much easier to distribute a work that by the original intention, copyright should actually be shorter than 28 years.
Pirates are not Robin Hood - They're just people too cheap to pay for what they want and too weak to just go without it.
Apple cites an 80 gig iPod as holding 20,000 songs. At $1/song, that's $20k to fill. That's more than a year's salary, at minimum wage. And they make 160 gig iPods.
So no, it's not that they're cheap. It's that there's more available, more readily, and we have broader musical tastes -- and as a result, the perception of any one song has changed.
I don't understand the connection here. What does Apple citing an iPod as holding that many songs have anything to do with "So no, it's not that they're cheap..." And what do you mean by "the perception of any one song has changed"? I'm not being a jerk, I just truly don't get what you're trying to say.
If you're pointing out that it's unreasonable to fill 80 gigs with legitimate music, I would disagree. Plenty of people have built up rather large CD collections over the years, and putting all of that on an iPod could be realistic.
It's also marketing. That's an average of 4 megs per song. When I rip music, the songs usually come out to be twice that. But it certainly helps sales to say 20,000 songs--most people don't even realize that they'll probably never fill that up.
And none of that even begins to consider freely downloadable content, or commercial content which is cheaper than $1/song. I'm pretty sure that between the CDs I already own, freely downloadable music that I like, and my few downloaded purchases, that I could fill up 100gigs easily. All completely legitimately.
That's a lot of bile you seem to have built up against firefox. I'm not sure most people are ready to write mozilla off just yet though.
Not the original poster, but I honestly think that Firefox is just the lesser of two evils. Ok, three evils if you include Opera (which I do use pretty regularly, but I wish that it had extension support.)
Personally, I like to use my web browser constantly - as a quick reference while running many other programs. I might have 5 files up in a text editor, 20 tabs open for quick reference in firefox, and a video or music playing at the same time. I don't have a state of the art computer, and a web browser that uses up that much ram would make my whole system slow down.
How did you deal with Firefox before 3.0 came out? You know, back when it snorted RAM like a coke addict?
Firefox' success over IE is due almost entirely to its being faster and less resource intensive, this is what people want in a browser - and it sounds like chrome fails pretty badly on this front.
That's how Firefox got its foothold. Then it got bloated, too. Then it got a little leaner.
Chrome's no messiah, but if you've got a reasonably recent computer (mine's 4 years old with 1.5GB RAM) it runs like a dream. The rendering is zippy, Javascript-heavy sites are amazingly fast, and even the UI seems snappier, despite (or perhaps because of) not using the standard Windows controls.
But it's got flaws besides using lots of RAM. The lack of extensions is going to cause a lot of people to dismiss it. Lack of skinning may turn some people off, too.
Ultimately, it's about choice. People with machines which can handle it may find Chrome to be a huge improvement. Everyone else is certainly welcome to stick with one of the other browsers. But as the older computers die away and are replaced with machines with more RAM (most machines come with 1GB standard these days, some with 2GB, and RAM's pretty cheap to add on) Chrome may well find its stride.
Extensions are going to be a must if Google wants Chrome to succeed. I won't use the web without NoScript, at a minimum, and I'd really like to have Adblock, too.
Sure, but that's the rub. The pay for cleaning toilets is relatively low (compared to lots of white-collar work) because anyone can do it. There's far more supply for custodial work than there is demand, and the supply and demand curve compensates.
I've been tinkering on and off with a scheme to back up my regular mail to Gmail. I encrypt the body, but not the headers. This way, if my mail host goes down, I still have easy access to my archived mail.
The biggest problem I have yet to overcome is Google's zealous spam filter. So far, I've been unable to overcome it automatically, and therefore some messages get lost unless I log into my account and mark them as "not spam."
Regardless, Google is free to the encrypted versions of my e-mail. I'm not that concerned about it.
Right. Before Windows had automatic updates, people lamented about how hard it was to get your average user to update. Would your grandmother go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com periodically if you told her to? Most probably wouldn't.
Google probably would have been smart to include this as an option on the installer, checked by default. Then again, for most home users, this is really an option which should be on by default, and at least slightly difficult to change. When the first big Chrome malware hits, we'll all be crying for updates, won't we?
I think that what really happened is that Google screwed up, copied their Google Apps license verbatim, and didn't think about the repercussions. A license like that doesn't even make sense in the context of a browser--it makes sense in the context of a service. It's a boilerplate bit of text which prevents me from successfully suing a company, say Slashdot, for publishing content I posted.
In other words, Slashdot's lawyers would laugh at me for even trying to sue Slashdot for publishing this particular post, which is copyrighted by me.
It's interesting that "legitimate" software thinks it can act like spyware and the community won't notice.
Oh for heaven's sake.
It's open source. If Google thought that people wouldn't notice spyware in there, they're pretty damned stupid. Here's a hint--it probably updates Chrome on your computer. Out of date software is a pretty big problem in the Windows world, you know.
I am with you, I will not install software that doesn't give me control over what is and where it is installed. Especially when there is no notice or ability to disable certain unwanted "features".
Now that, I can agree with. Then again, it's beta software. Today is only the second day it's been released to the public. I'm sure that, in time, these kinks will be smoothed out.
Perhaps if you have a problem with imperfect software, you shouldn't be installing betas. Of course, you probably shouldn't be installing any software, but at least you might have a legitimate complaint if it's a release rather than a pre-release.
Our society is built upon people who can't get other jobs doing the jobs that no one else wants. In this case, you'd hope that other people could be an ISP technician, but your suggestion would be impossible even if it weren't horribly elitist. With rare exception, college graduates don't want to clean toilets for a living.
Everyone's talking about lawyers and whatnot... what happened to just being polite? I guess lawyers have ruined that too.
Really, it's the law that's ruined it all. Legal bickering based on imprecise wording has effectively created an entire industry of lawyers.
Of course, getting too precise in the wording could have the same effect, as people need lawyers just to sort out what the law is actually saying. But at least we wouldn't have to worry about the law being interpreted differently based upon the judge you happen to get.
And more to the point of your post, if he's polite and the other party pulls out the big guns (a lawyer), it could all be over. Things that he says could be used against him in court, making him look like a squatter. It's kinda like a real life prisoner's dilemma.
You've really hit the nail on the head, here. I'd wager that a hefty percentage of IE users think that Internet Explorer is the Internet. They won't switch because they don't even realize that they can.
A smaller percentage probably use IE because there are still some sites which simply don't work without it, and they don't want to have to manage two browsers.
Webkit/Gecko is just used for rendering. The UI and other back-end parts of the browser are completely separate.