On 5/12/05, warpmedia <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > People can learn and do learn. They didn't switch to FF because it was > easier or to diss M$, they did so because everyone & his mother was > pushing it as more secure at a time when security is in the news daily.. > In fact there's less vectors, but it's just as insecure in the hands of > john q public as IE is.
I installed FF on my machine with default settings and I surf everywhere (yes, even pr0n sites) and have yet to have a single popup window I didn't want or auto-inserted bookmark or re-directed homepage or search bar added. Yeah there are some security holes out there that could be exploited, but until start hitting them every time I launch my browser I won't really care. And unfortunately that is the mindset of the common user, who is exactly the person we need to convince about OSS and the way software should be. > Failing to do so? That's going a bit far Brian, no? Hell no. How long has M$ been in the browser business? How many new innovations have they come up with since they trounced Netscape and won the browser war? How many standards do they support fully? How have they complied with the court order to de-couple IE from the OS which would make a lot of the browser hijacks less damaging system wide? I for one am pretty damn fed up. > None of this is (nor will) removing AOL from desktops and there's quite > a few of that type of idiot. PEOPLE have to change and software has to > be better thought out/written whether it's complicated or simple to use > is secondary. I know of 18 people who have personally asked me to help install Firefox and/or installed it themselves. 10 were former AOL users. That is just a grain of sand on the beach, but that is just my personal experience. I think the numbers are bigger than you imagine. And you are wrong about the simple to use being secondary. It is primary in a world with many products all competing for the same niche or where you have a single entrenched product. Take TIVO for an example. If you look at the user feedback, the #1 comment that people like about it (the non-techie housewife types) is that it is easy to use. They don't care about hard drive capacity, broadcast flags, streaming ability, kernel versions, or any of that stuff. They want it to do the one or two things they bought it for and they want it to do it simply. Of course implicit in this is that the object actually works and does its job well, but if this is the case it is invisible to the user. > Fine but the premise was one of more secure which has been driving the > john q public downloads. This is not as true and in fact can be less > than true given that everything is on or off feature wise even without > activex problems. They are fixing problems quickly but they're were not > supposed to have the problems to begin with given their stance of more > secure than IE. I agree that FF might have been a bit oversold by the developers. But if they had come out and said, "here is out software, it is more secure from an activex and blah blah blah standpoint, but just as insecure on blah blah blah" would people have installed it? Nope. I will take a little exaggeration of the truth in marketing to ensure that people actually go out and try it as long as you continue to improve your product, which they are. -- Brian
