the corner office

I've been using Mozilla on and off for quite some time now. In the past few months, I've used it pretty much exclusively for web browsing, except for Internet banking, since the South African banking industry by and large is still in an IE-only world (Two banks were laid low by MSBlaster this week. I say nothing).

Anyway, anti MS-centric-bank rants aside, I think Mozilla is a fine piece of software. One thing that irritates me, is how the pundits diss the Mozilla team and Netscape prior, for letting IE win the browser wars, while they doodled around with bug-management software and got all 'virtuous' by rewriting the rendering engine from scratch. The business heads seem to think this was a travesty and squandered opportunity. Even Jamie Zawinsky got fed up and left.

I think it's bunk. If anything, it was the commercially-driven browser war that has left us with the piece of sh*t known as Internet Explorer, and the much-loved but utterly unstable and crappy Netscape Navigator versions pre-Gecko. To my mind, a bunch of people who sat down and said 'let's do this right' have come up with the goods, and may yet prove that the past few years were but a single battle in the browser wars.

And if it isn't, who cares? Yes, it's a pity that I can't use Mozilla for my Internet banking, but then I couldn't with Netscape 4 years ago either, when NN still had some browser share. But nowadays I have a tool that I like. It's stable, it's standards-compliant, and it appears to be without any other agenda but providing a useful, powerful and reliable browsing experience.

The fact that more and more techies these days talk about moving back to Mozilla, must be very gratifying for the people who took their time and did things right, despite a lot of criticism. More power to them.