Ten-year timeline part 6: almost to the present

I had forgotten when Ubuntu came on the scene.  Not even three and a half years ago.  They
have accomplished a lot in such a short time, especially with name recognition.

"The Firefox 1.0 release was, in a very real sense, the much-delayed culmination of the
process which began back in 1998, when Netscape announced that it would be releasing its code.
Firefox was almost seven years in the making, but, sometimes, late really is better than
never. Even those of us who use a different browser should be thankful for the effect Firefox
has had toward the creation of a standard-compliant web and a competitive environment for web
browsers."

I'd like to agree, but there seems to be a very recent backlash of sorts occurring on the part
of some Web developers.  It seems as though there is suddenly a willingness to code for IE
only citing "Firefox security issues".  Digging a bit deeper one comes to the realization that
it is the open development of Firefox  and "a lack of development security" that the web
developers are referring to.

Now, who would be promoting that idea?  Who would benefit?  When pressed, those developers are
adamant that only IE will be "supported".  Something is going on in the back rooms, especially
just at the point it seemed that cross-platform compatibility was a done deal.  It looks like
as though while MS has been making a big deal about playing nice with the F/OSS community,
they have been up to other actions behind the scenes.

Here is a thread that alerted me to this kind of thinking:

http://kzrider.com/component/option,com_joomlaboard/Itemi...

I've since learned from communications with others of similar responses from certain web
developers.