Sunday, November 28, 2004
Market vs. personal taste
In 1995 somebody showed me how cool Netscape NN handles email, which was a giant step compared to elm and pine and it did run on a PC compared to the UNIX workstations. I got hooked. I have now my NN email archive transfered since these days from PC to PC. Only after 1.0 I trusted mozilla enough to switch away from NN for mail handling. I browsed with mozilla since M13, but was pretty conservative with the email archive. I use regularly the browser, email, chat, composer, and the dom inspector. I like the tight integration. So up to now I can't see what gain I should have from converting to ff.
As the sharp increase in firefox usage shows my personal taste and the mass market don't coincide. Which isn't necessarily bad. However this increase in market share fulfills my initial intention to work on the project: keep the Internet infrastructure public as opposed to a MS controlled infrastructure. I did not expect it to happen this way, but if firefox spreads the Gecko UA-string, what else should one desire.
(Hmm ,a single package with ff, thunderbird, chatzilla and nvu with a decent unified modern theme, but thats probably too much even for Christmas)
