To John, I Apologize - To Portable Apps, Thanks & Congrats

If I might reply to this, leave a thought of my own - yes Firefox is better than Internet Explorer. By leaps and bounds. And Linux is better than Windows in many ways.

What I don't get is this negativity towards making Firefox resemble IE. I really don't see that, but I kind of see what you're getting at.

Why put a Pinto body on a Corvette, you ask? Bad analogy on its face, because a Corvette costs a heck of a lot more than a Pinto. Also they operate the same way, really. It's not the body of the car you're talking about, it's the dash. What's right in front of you. Now say I'm a visitor from the future, and I bring with me my car. It's a shapeshifter. It can fly, it can go on the water - hell, it can go underwater. It's literally what Firefox is to Internet Explorer. The same thing, basically, but done a lot better. We become friends and I let you drive this future car. You get in and you're sitting inside, well, your own car. You tell me "but this is a future car, yet inside it looks just like my Pinto". I tell you "well it's also a shapeshifter, I made it look like that so you could operate it."

Linux is a shapeshifter, of sorts. You've got the command line, where its real power lies, but try getting a Windows user to use the command line. Not going to happen. So you've got Gnome. Or KDE. Gnome's made to resemble Mac OS and KDE looks like Windows. Sort of - on both counts. The UI is what gets proprietary software users to try open source. Once they get used to the open source software, they're able to stick with that and reap the benefits of others, or maybe they learn about programming and dive into the source code, and contribute. But you're not gonna get people to change without offering some kind of familiarity.

I used to love Internet Explorer 6. I tried Firefox when it was still Firebird, I was not impressed, so I went back to IE6. IE6 did what I wanted, it was fine for my needs, and it was secure enough. I'm still confident I can secure IE6 for someone, so long as they don't go looking for p*rn or warez. The first version of Firefox I kept, I believe it was 0.93. I went back and forth for a while, but by 1.0 I was a dedicated Firefox user. I don't do any development for it, or any extensions, but I do introduce others to it, I help get Mozilla some of that precious market share. I believe that just by converting a few IE holdouts to Firefox, I'm doing my part to make a change that leads to better security and safer browsing for all. Because the more people go over to Mozilla, the harder Microsoft works to make IE7 and now IE8 the browser IE was when Netscape was out, when they had competition and IE had to be good, else people would go to Netscape. Now Mozilla is bringing the fight, and again we're seeing IE improvement.

More can be done, though. Microsoft could tell the advertising industry to shove off, include an ad blocker with IE and keep it updated, that'd be a nice start. But what really needs to happen is for IE to be made open source, or the source to be opened to a select few, develop and nurture a community of enthusiasts, who can react quicker to security threats and the changing face of the Internet faster than Redmond's own IE team. Mozilla has the right idea, and until Microsoft adopts that idea or adapts it to their own business model, they're going to have the perpetually inferior browser.

But all of this, making things better, improving Firefox, making Linux equal to Windows and eventually surpassing Windows in all things (and let's face it - there are still hurdles to overcome), it's got to start with appealing to the lowest common denominator. When I was in high school (graduated 1998), only nerds used computers. Jocks and cheerleaders didn't touch 'em. Now they're into computers in a big way. Rock Band's even got parents and grandparents using Xboxes and PlayStations. And who ain't on MySpace anymore? More and more people are moving to the Internet, and they mostly want something simple that they can understand. So the best way is to offer them something that works like what they know and then show them how it's better.

I would only do that on windows to get the aero look. Glass looks soooooo nice.

would be for people like myself who work for a company who is afraid of technology and have a bunch of doughnut eating IT people unwilling to compromise with those who want to run Firefox. So I have to skin Firefox as much as possible to fool those that pass by my computer. This worked for a while but the doughnut eating computer police spotted some evidence on the drive somewhere and now are on a hunt to see who hacked the computers and is "loading" firefox on them. So the more my portable version can resemble IE the better. I've had a couple of people jump on my computer to show me something on the internet without realizing what I was running. GD