New mozilla.org Site Launches (MozillaZine)

Posted Nov 21, 2003 13:42 UTC (Fri) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

> It seems sad that so few people in the "real" world are aware
> that there is vastly superior software available to that which
> they use every day.

I'm seeing encouraging signs on that front recently, yes, in the "real world",
well, at least as it applies to my ISP, a "real world" popular ISP that also
happens to be a cable TV provider (US).

Put it this way.. While the ISP itself still only "supports" IE/OE, and resorted
to a temporary filtering of ICMP in many areas as a fix for one of the recent
"MSWormOS" worms, thus providing evidence of the type of user they have
far to many of (the clueless one that gets infected with every worm to come
along.. unfortunately), I've recently seen a **MARKED** change in the
atmosphere on the ISP-local discussion groups. At least among this group
(which is admittedly still the technically semi-elite, since many don't even
know what newsgroups are, but gotta start somewhere..), the attitude is that
anyone who is "with it" will at least use another browser for SOME of their
browsing, if not as the standard/default browser. Another trend is that while
it used to be Opera that was always mentioned as the alternative, it's now
Mozilla.

Case in point.. The ISP recently announced the availability of free pop-up
blocking software. A surprisingly large proportion of responses seemed to be
"Big deal, Mozilla has had that for awhile now. Sure, the clueless and
stick-in-the-muds may benefit, but it won't affect me since I never use IE
except on the MS site anyway."

Keep in mind that type of response would of course be self-limited to those
still using MSWormOS, so would exclude the "radical" Linux/BSD and Mac
voices that usually reply that way, and that this is an ISP that apparently
believes in job security for its abuse department, because it only supports the
MS products that cause that department the most headaches, including
IE/OE/OL specifically and exclusively. While this ISP *IS* broadband, in
other respects, it couldn't be a more general cross-section of the "real world"
even if one were deliberately TRYING for that.

As I said, this has changed within the last six months to a year. Before that,
anything not IE/OE/MS *WAS* the fringe, in those ISP-local groups. While
I generally use Konqueror as my preferred browser, this is of course IMO still
a very good thing, because it shows the mind-share *IS* shifting.

The trend is similar for other products as well. While most are still using
MSWormOS, in most cases, the general agreement, whether it be on browsers
or mail or news clients, or even to some extent on office software, is that the
MS solution is no longer the preferred solution. There are to many security
issues. The feature set is seen as to set and controlled by the maker, who is
said to be remote and unresponsive to user requests, etc. The attitude does
extend to the OS to some extent already, but most users are still in the "it's to
early to be asking me to change THAT" mode yet, tho they are beginning to
be open to the POSSIBILITY, which means give it a couple years and they
might actually be comfortable enough with it to try it, particularly if all the
apps they are switching to now are known to run on both. =:^)

(Note that this post is from someone who was active in the IE4-5.5 public
beta tests and groups, was waiting in line at midnight for what I now call Lose
98, and who himself took actually more like three years to go from that, to
making the switch myself! Thus, I have reason to say as I did above "give it a
couple years", because I've been there, and am now HERE\! =:^)