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"Stop Using Internet Explorer" screamed at me from the midst of stories about strengthening my immune system. Complete with the recent CERT warning and a link to download FireFox.
That kind of attention to switching browsers is something new, in my book. If more of that starts happening the browsing world may shift in its IE orbit!
With the mainstream attention in the media and now newletters from non-IT sources (like Tedsters doctor contact) there will be more attention put on the likes of Mozilla and Opera.
The question is will people read and change browser or jsut read and continue as they are?
<afterthought>
If we begin to see a significant shift away from IE browser towards Mozilla (and lets not forget Opera) then this may well have an impact on the way we develop sites. Many people tend to concentrate on IE (which as a business decision is not without fault - cater for the masses), but if Mozilla and Opera start to come to the fore new techniques that have been avoided may now get more airing...
</afterthought>
I have now switched to Firefox after spending several days cleansing my toxified system from IE incursions, and realised once again, I have to do double the work to publish any site. Not happy really. I hated MS owning the browser marketplace to some extent, but damn it simplified the process for developers.
I even had deliberate poor coding on my own site so that if anyone browsed it from Netscape (4.xx) it looked like crap and they wouldn't ask me to work on their site. I know some of you will despise me for that, and I'm sorry, but NS4 was an awful thing and like game developers explaining why it makes no economic sense to develop ports of their games for Mac/*nix environments, I can only offer the same explanation.
But now, here I am spending hours pouring through forums trying to find out how to minimise the painfull differences in Moz5/IE6 page rendering. And can I charge my clients any more? Not easily.
It is a much faster development cycle. I used to be fearful of standards mode and always write to quirks mode. But after I became fluent with standards (not as bad a lerning curve as I thought) and then had a few of the main IE issues understood, I found I could generate templates and pages the fastest I ever had.
When I see a healthcare newsletter giving their clients advice to switch away from IE, however, it's not about the author's development cycle. He really cares about people and he sees the security issues as important to his clients' overall well being.
