2by4 - 7:13 am on Feb 19, 2005 (gmt 0)

Multiman, I've enjoyed reading your polemics, which is all I take them for, but in this case I simply can't follow your reasoning:
You don't want to use firefox because Google is evil. From this I assume you don't want to use software produced by evil companies. Ignoring the fact that google doesn't produce firefox, there's a slight - well, ok, it's not slight, it's a yawning canyon - gap in your reasoning here. MS is without any doubt, by any standard, if you follow their legal history, which is pretty interesting, the single most evil software/os company on the planet. They have no competition at all in that area. Yet you appear to be completely satisfied typing away in MSIE, using MS Windows. How can you explain this? It makes no sense at all.

If you want to choose what software you use based on ethical or moral grounds, you clearly would have abandoned IE years ago, but here you are, still using MSIE. There are lots of other choices out there, you could be running a Mac with Safari, you could be running Linux with Konqueror, but you aren't.

This is leaving aside the fact that Firefox, Konqueror, Opera, Safari, are all excellent alternatives to MSIE, on any level. Either Opera or Firefox are significantly superior developer tools. The connection between Google and mozilla is really just a working thing, and is very new. I switched to Gecko based browsers something like 4 years ago, one of the reasons I switched was because it makes no sense using products from a company that is in fact really evil, so I stopped using it. Keep in mind that MS produces IE, directly. Google may or may not be developing a Firefox version Google branded browser, that's something we'll see in the future. Google also has other agendas, aside from the evil ones you're fond of pointing out, some of which Brett Tabke pointed out, technical spidering matters. They also have a pretty large debt to pay off to the open source community, they owe them, big time, so it's just barely possible they are simply trying to help pay off a tiny fraction of that debt, it's hard to say. But what's not hard to say is that if you don't want to use products made by evil companies, what on earth are you using MSIE for. That's just plain ridiculous.

I'm not fond of the Troll designation, never have been, but I am having problems following your attempts to justify why you keep using MSIE, that just doesn't make any sense.