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Story: Netscape 8 'breaks' IE

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I’m not one to come to the defense of Microsoft, but this article is an example of how bad journalism has become. It would take only a minute to review the facts to see that Netscape is altering a registry setting that belongs to another program (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Plugins\Extension). Even worse it does so without asking and changes it back if you try to fix it.

It is not the obligation of the reporter to speculate that it could be the fault of the “victim” so the article will appear balanced. In fact it makes it look unbalanced because the claim is unreasonable and the reporter would just like to perpetuate this dark cloud over Microsoft. Likewise you shouldn’t report if I speculate as to why Netscape did what they did. They might have been trying to make it easier to use IE plug-ins for example, who knows at this point? But I do think Netscape owes us an answer and you should look to get it.

Just because an uninformed user, who we don’t know their background, makes a speculation it does not become newsworthy enough to report. On that note you should not take my word on this since you don’t know who I am or my qualifications. But, we do expect that someone from ZDNET will have taken the time to investigate their facts before reporting on them.

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