Code Quality

Useful blog entry on MS tools for ensuring code quality.

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Firefox Ad

The Firefox add has apperantly run. Nice to see.

I used Netscape way back in the early days, and was sorely disappointed with the initial IE releases. Then IE surpassed Netscape in nearly every way I could care about, and I left them for IE. The whole government thing than followed, and frankly, I thought it was useless MS bashing. Even if MS hadn’t bundled it in the OS (which I do think makes sense, even if it created some security concerns later) or given it away free, there was no comparing Netscape and IE, so I believe most users would have still run IE.

Then the Mozilla movement came. I tried several versions along the way… mostly because I had to for doing web development. They all sucked, quite frankly. I even recall a version of Netscape that was released that once installed, you couldn’t uninstall. They rendered slowly, and had non-native looking UIs with bad designs. I figured the wars were over, and IE was the sole survivor.

Years passed. IE started showing it’s age. No releases add little of note. The web standards left the product in the dust (and considering how slowly standards evolve, there’s little excuse for MS having let this occur). The ActiveX integration in IE proved to be the worst possible security hole ever conceived. Spyware became a much bigger problem than viruses (why do we classify them as something other than a virus, btw?). We desperately needed something new, but I figured we were out of luck, since MS wasn’t doing anything, and the others were producing products that I considered worse than the IE alternative.

Then along came Firefox. I’ve mostly made the switch (the IE integration means I still use several programs that have embedded IE, but I run Firefox as my main browser). It’s a wonderful product. So good in fact, that MS will be hard pressed to get back into the browser wars again. It’s not going to be easy for them to win back those that make the switch, and the numbers making the switch are increasing quickly. MS has certainly dropped the ball in this case. I still want them to put out a new browser, and soon, since IE is embedded in so many other apps, but even when they do, it may not become my main browser again.

BTW, Thunderbird is worth your checking out as well. Very nice little mail application, based on the Mozilla architecture.

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