A good plug for Firefox at the Sydney Morning Herald.

It’s a good treatise on what’s to like about Firefox but it’s a shame the article wheels out Microsoft’s business practises with respect to Internet Explorer’s current, dominant position. While I do have sympathy for the argument that Microsoft used its position to gain market share for its browser, it has to be said that, for those of us designing Web sites in the mid- to late-‘90s, IE did a much better job of rendering our designs as we intended them. Not only that, it was a much better user experience too! To refresh your memory you only have to go back as far as 2001’s Netscape 4.7x (I still have large institutional customers running this version), resize your window and watch the entire page reload. You can infer from this the code crud that Netscape was buckling under. The weight of unmanageable code stifling design and usability is often a neglected subject when discussing the “browser wars”. (There’s discussion along these lines and insight into decisions made by Netscape, unrelated to Microsoft, that hastened their fall from dominance, in Wired 8.08’s interview with Marc Andreessen.)

Similarly with respect to criticisms of security – holes are highly likely to be found in a complex system if you’ve got a large enough installed base.

I don’t want to appear as a Microsoft apologist. I do use and promote Firefox as the browser of choice whenever I can, and I get at least as frustrated with Redmond’s take on CSS as the next guy. Anyway, rant over!