There’s a lot of interest in Firefox these days. I’ve had plenty of people ask me about it. People seem to be in two different camps about Firefox. On camp sings the praises of Firefox and the other camp talks about the security of Firefox. I’m not in either camp; the fact that I don’t use Firefox is all about history, my history.
I started cruising the web before Windows 95 came out and with the now ubiquitous IE. At that time there weren’t many choices for web browsers. I was Testing a version of Mosaic (which I thought was one step above Lynx) when Netscape came out. After seeing Netscape I demo’d it for awhile and then finally bought it. Not long after Win95 came out and the world began to hate Microsoft for giving us a free browser. Well I always cheer for the underdog and sense I had already purchased Netscape I too hated Microsoft’s free browser. Netscape became my great friend when they too began to give me it’s browser for free. So I battled the Evil Microsoft by using Netscape for the next couple of years.
During those years Netscape and Microsoft appealed to the WWW consortium to get code they were each developing to become the next standard. Unfortunately for Netscape Microsoft decided to implement stuff that was not approved by the W3C and certainly not by Netscape. Soon after I found that websites I would go to wouldn’t work at all in Netscape. So then I reluctantly started using IE, but only to view the those renegade sites. Then soon I found myself going to IE more and more because things would look wrong in Netscape or the sites wouldn’t load at all. Then one fateful day I too was assimilated and closed my Netscape browser for the last time.
Now years later I have scores of people singing me the praises of Firefox. Months after they’ve told me about how great it is they are aghast to find that I haven’t made the jump to this great browser. When I ask them what their overall experience is they say things like “well not every web page looks right in Firefox so I just open IE for those pages.”
Hmmm… sounds familiar!

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