scott <sco### [at] laptopcom> wrote:
> And yet funnily enough since Vista/IE7, I've seen people who previously were 
> using FF now going back to IE - "well it has tabbed browsing already doesn't 
> it?"

  Sometimes it scares me the power Microsoft has over people.

  Back when Netscape was approximately the only web browser in existence,
with something like 99% of market share, Microsoft published their first
version of IE and in something like *one month* it surpassed Netscape's
marketshare.

  Netscape back then was rather horrid, but Microsoft's IE was even
more horrendeous. It broke about every possible standard and RFC in
existence and was completely full of security holes. It was IE which
introduced the concept of going to a website and getting your system
infected with a trojan.

  Microsoft made six versions of IE, yet they still failed to support
even the most basic of standards, such as CSS and PNG, and the list
of serious security holes is just endless.

  Yet, regarldess, IE became almost overnight the industry standard.
Because IE broke almost every single standard in existence, IE-only
websites started to spawn. IE was the measurement by which the correctness
of websites were measured. If something worked in IE but didn't work in
another browser, it was that another browser which was broken, not IE.
Nobody dared to make websites which wouldn't work with IE, no matter how
many hoops they had to jump through to achieve that. It was simply better
to have an IE-only website than a website which wouldn't work with IE.

  Yet IE was so horridly broken that even the US government advised
their citizens to use another browser. Any browser except IE.

  It took something like 5 years or more of complete cessation of the
development of IE before people finally started to slowly migrate to
other browsers. Many people wouldn't let go even then. IE was like
some kind of brainwashing, like some kind of addictive drug: They just
couldn't let it go.

  It's really scary that one company can have this kind of power.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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