More on Firefox

Related to my post from last week about Firefox 0.9 RC (Release Candidate), I see that Joel (of Joel On Software fame) has upgraded to 0.9 as well. He mentions a few reasons to switch to Firefox (beyond the sheer coolness of the application). I like his third point:

You’ll help break the Microsoft Monopoly on web browsers. Microsoft took over the browser market fair and square by making a better product, but they were so afraid that Web-based applications would eliminate the need for Windows that they locked the IE team in a dark dungeon and they haven’t allowed improvements to IE for several years now. Now Firefox is the better product and there’s a glimmer of hope that one day DHTML will actually improve to the point where web-based applications are just as good as Windows-based applications.

I’m seeing this argument a lot and I think it’s a valid one. Microsoft essentially halted development on any browser standards (including proper support for PNG and CSS2) which means that Web applications have suffered from a usability and aesthetic viewpoint. With Firefox gaining ground in the market share department (though it’s still relatively tiny), hopefully this will bring about a revolution in new Web standards support and we’ll all be able to partake in the promised utopia that was supposed to be Internet applications.

I upgraded to Thunderbird 0.7 RC this afternoon. It’s nice to see so many good applications coming from the Mozilla group these days.

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