Common sense takes a holiday: buying the Enderle FUD [LWN.net]

From:		Sitaram Chamarty <sitaramc-AT-gmail.com>
To:		mattcmp-AT-sonic.net
Subject:		Common sense takes a holiday: buying the Enderle FUD
Date:		Wed, 23 Feb 2005 17:47:16 +0530
Cc:		letters-AT-lwn.net, trichardson-AT-theregister.co.uk

Dear Mr McKenzie,

I obtained your email address from http://www.linuxpipeline.com/contact.jhtml

I write with reference to an article by Rob Enderle, at
http://www.linuxpipeline.com/60401613 , titled "Reality Takes A
Holiday: Buying The Firefox Hype".

In the interests of brevity I will not go into Mr Enderle's past
record at objective analysis of open source issues, (who can forget
his role in getting SCO and BayStar together and his speech at SCO
Forum, among many other highlights). I will, therefore, restrict
myself to commenting on the points he had made in this article.

Yes, Firefox is at version 1.0. However, what Mr Enderle will not
acknowledge, even though I'm sure he knows, is that 1.0 in the open
source world means it has already been through a huge amount of
testing already. Open source does not have the commercial pressures
of getting something out the door by a certain date, so when an open
source project says "1.0", it means "quite ready for public
consumption, thank you very much".

Automatic patch delivery is certainly important, and in theory
Microsoft has it. However, does Mr Enderle know of any large
organisation that allows auto-updates for all their machines, without
some internal testing to make sure the patch does not mess up critical
applications? So why is this an issue?

Ben Goodger moving to Google is no more significant that Linus
Torvalds working for Transmeta for many years. Linux did not stop
dead while he was working for Transmeta, and neither will Firefox just
because Ben Goodger is at Google. Even if that were to happen, the
beauty of the open source world is that there are others who can step
in if needed.

I have no idea how he can say Firefox breaks on banking and e-commerce
sites. The only app for which I still need to borrow someone's
Windows machine to use IE is, sadly, an inhouse application.
[Naturally, I cannot tell you who I work for :-)] It is well known
that corporate applications are able to get away with more stringent
demands on users ("you must have IE to use our intranet portal") while
banks and other sites meant to be accessed by the general public need
to be more careful.

Anyway you get the drift. I'll stop here. I'm sure you'll hear from
others about this.

With best wishes,

Sitaram Chamarty

--
sitaramc@gmail.com

(Log in to post comments)

Sample bank not supporting Firefox

Posted Feb 24, 2005 7:54 UTC (Thu) by tousavelo (guest, #27022) [Link]

Hello,

About "I have no idea how he can say Firefox breaks on banking and e-commerce
sites."
Take www.dexia-bil.lu. It will _not_ allow its customers to access their bank account from Firefox. End of 2004, the bank mentioned that the site would be redesigned by mid 2005 and would then support Firefox.

Sample bank not supporting Firefox

Posted Feb 24, 2005 8:08 UTC (Thu) by rganesan (subscriber, #1182) [Link]

I have a similar situation. <a href="http://www.hsbc.co.in/">HSBC India</a> insists on IE or Netscape 4.72 (!). Not a problem. Just download "User Agent Switcher" extension for firefox and everything works.

Sample bank not supporting Firefox

Posted Feb 24, 2005 20:17 UTC (Thu) by tousavelo (guest, #27022) [Link]

Thanks for the suggestion but the Agent Switcher didn't help.

Sample bank not supporting Firefox

Posted Feb 24, 2005 17:39 UTC (Thu) by kh (subscriber, #19413) [Link]

Sadly, Bank of America's Investment Services also:
www.baisidirect.com

I think someone needs to create a website of shame with listings of the high profile sites to put pressure on these organizations.

Sample bank not supporting Firefox

Posted Feb 25, 2005 14:29 UTC (Fri) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

Interesting. One of the reasons I use BofA for my checking (and a credit
card tied to the same master login) is because it works with Konqueror.
I'm now running KDE/Konqueror 3.3.92 (3.4-rc2), but it has worked with
Konqueror since I switched to Linux, back with KDE/Konqueror 2.1, IIRC.

I believe they've worked with Mozilla Seamonkey (which I used to use some)
and now Mozilla Firefox (which I've never downloaded) for the same period.

In fact, BofA is Linux friendly enough to have been on the SCO short list
to sue, but they took on AutoZone instead. I'm proud to say I am a
customer of both.

So... I find it confusing and disheartening to read that they don't extend
the same support across their product line. Obviously, I'd be looking
elsewhere if I couldn't access them with Konqueror or at least /some/
freedomware browser for my needs, as I've been off of slaveware as a
platform for some time, now, and therefore couldn't use IE if I wanted to,
since the license I'd have to agree to, to do so, is no longer something
I /could/ agree to.

Duncan

Common sense takes a holiday: buying the Enderle FUD

Posted Mar 3, 2005 11:19 UTC (Thu) by nurhussein (guest, #16226) [Link]

Dear Fellow Readers,

Mr. Enderle has repeatedly proven himself and idiotic jackass. Please, ignore him and his ilk, as it's exhausting to try and use logic and reason with idiotic Microsoft apologists hellbent on trying to make Linux and open source in general look as bad as possible, regardless of how stupid their arguments sound. In my observation such fools have a tendency to completely ignore facts in their bias, which I must assume comes from either a hatred of open source or a blind loyalty to Microsoft, or just plain mental retardation.

Other jackasses you should similarly ignore is Darl McBride or any of his henchman and Ken Brown of ADTI.

Yours sincerely,

- Nur Hussein

Common sense takes a holiday: buying the Enderle FUD

Posted Mar 3, 2005 17:39 UTC (Thu) by oshogg (guest, #23126) [Link]

Not exactly banking sites, but there are many sites that I regularly visit that just do not work in Firefox.

http://global.factiva.com
http://www.sandesh.com
http://www.gujaratsamachar.com

I have already tried User Agent Switcher for these sites.

The last two gives font problems that I have found no solution for.

Osho