Letters to the editor

Who says Netscape's *lost*?

You assume the browser war is over.
 
Your recent news.com.com piece <http://news.com.com/2010-1071-992568.html>
makes that clear.
 
I think your argument is based on a flawed premise, myself.
 
AOL is shipping the Gecko browser core as part of AOL8, which you may
not have noticed, since you didn't mention it in your piece. I'll
*assume* you didn't know it, since it would be horribly disingenuous
for you to fail to mention such a pertinent item in a column like that.
:-)
 
In any event, between that release -- which is likely to garner at
*least* 5 million desktops out of AOL's something like 30M, and Apple's
adoption of the KDE Konqueror core for it's new Safari browser -- a not
inconsequential number of seats...
 
and given that Moz is 100% standards compliant, and Konq is pretty
close, I don't by any means think that IE has "won" the browser war --
since *it* is *not*.
 
Piss off millions of AOLians and Macheads? Nope; businesses won't stay
*there* for long.
 
And the whole landscape will change again.
 
And it will be due, in large part, to Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds
and Eric Raymond -- none of whom were getting paid for it.
 
A parallel irony, somehow, to the commercial explosion of the Internet,
a project spearheaded by a bunch of largely gay, longhair college
students. :-)
 
Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com
Member of the Technical Staff Baylink RFC 2100
The Suncoast Freenet The Things I Think
Tampa Bay, Florida http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274
 
   "If you don't have a dream; how're you gonna have a dream come true?"
     -- Captain Sensible, The Damned (from South Pacific's "Happy Talk")

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