Firefox fills the IE void

In January 2004, 94.8 percent of Web surfers used Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher, according to the Web analytics research company OneStat.com. Not me, though. For many months I've been using a Mozilla-based browser that can't seem to settle on a name: Phoenix, Firebird, now Firefox. Identity crisis notwithstanding, it rocks.

Trust me on this — I'm no knee-jerk open source bigot. During Mozilla's long nuclear winter, I stuck with IE because I wasn't willing to live with compromises. Then the tables turned. Suddenly, IE was the compromise I could not live with. Bugs didn't get fixed. Standards support didn't improve. New features didn't appear. And the last vestige of cross-platform ambition evaporated when IE for the Mac was killed last year. The message is clear: Internet Explorer is dead in the water.

Ironically, although Microsoft cited competition with Apple's Safari as the reason for killing IE for the Mac, I've abandoned Safari on OS X for the same reason I've abandoned IE on Windows. Firefox does more, it's moving faster, and — here's the kicker — it runs identically on Windows, OS X, and Linux.

ed. - it's great to see "mainstream" news sites taking up this issue.

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