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Story: Firefox community weighs up IE 7 threat

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Barnett is wrong.

Already Microsoft is handling its FireFox problem wrong by announcing a XP SP2 only, as usual still vaporware, update for IE6 SP2 (also a XP SP2 only product).

When and if released it'll be half of what was promised. Combined with things that turn out to break or needing reprogramming "for better user experience (tm)". Followed soon thereafter with a flood of fixes and exploits. At least if history has learned us anything because that is the repeating theme since 1995.

Do you think that adopting IE7 will come with zero effort, zero cost and zero man hours? No way. And the thank you for all that? Jump through the hoops again becomes here comes Longhorn. Part one. Next runner up. Longhorn part one and a half. Guess what comes after that. Hint: it's what you've been doing since 1995. You guessed it: you did it all wrong, you need the latest and greatest, again.

Adopt FireFox and you'll have to jump through hoops as well. Sure enough there will be challenges along the way (e.g.: booting out those commercially motivated external advisors that somehow seem to be able to run up bills everytime you follow their "independant" advise). But once that's behind you (e,g: finding alternatives for those websites that are too lazy or too ignorant to come up with anything but an IE-only "website"; a better word for such websites would be a "NBM site"; Nothing But Microsoft) and that's it. You've invested most of the blood, sweat and tears needed to make and continue the change over.

It's your choice. It's your time, your sweat, your blood and your tears.

Microsoft, with its huge R&D budget, its "Thrustworthy Computing" claims, is alleged large developers network, its enormous profits margins and its immense cash reserve just told you: we can't fix your IE problems in Windows 98, Windows NT or even Windows 2000.

But a 19 year old could. With FireFox.

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