"I concur with 'bub' with regards to replacing IE and OE.... not a good idea."

I think t *is* a good idea... Firefox has many more features, and the most overlooked one is the possibility to use extensions. And there are extensions for about everything...

"Users want compatibility, ease of use and simple support options. IE and OE are the most compatible products of their type with the vast majority of the internet"

No they aren't! They're the most INcompatible products out there, but because there is so much of them out there, web-designer got the weird, misguided idea they should optimize for them, whereas the others conform much closer to the W3C Standards... If you build your site conform W3C Standards, all browsers will work, although IE will prolly look funny... But if Web Designers kept to the W3C Stadards, then M$ would have to adjust, rather than the other way around, as they would rapidly lose ground to other browsers that *do*!

"and are reasonably secure products if rule #1 (automatic updates) is followed."

Firefox now also has an auto-update feature...

"MS too often gets a bad rap simply because it is the most popular. It got popular for a reason..."

Yep, Bloatware, Hot Air (AKA Marketing) and Monopoly abuse

"they provided products that consumers wanted."

Not really, they delivered a product a big company wanted, and because of dumb luck became the defacto standard (MS-DOS wasn't even written by Gates & Co!)

"Non-MS products have security flaws as well, often more so than MS products. They simply have the luxury of not being as popular with consumers, and thus they are not large targets by malware writers."

Partially true, but usually - when Open Source - the people that find the exploit, also provide patch code to update the software...

"Believe me when I say that ANY product (Thunderbird, Linux, etc.) would have the exact same security problems MS has now if they ever became as popular as MS."

Not quite true, as OS has many more people working on fixing stuff, and often has a fix for a problem within a day!

[ reply ]

Link to this comment: http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/columns/262/28243#28243