title: El Reg headline: You all look bloody shifty to me (or, why is IE still our standard browser?) link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/el-reg-headline-you-all-look-bloody-shifty-to-me-or-why-is-ie-still-our-standard-browser/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 263 created: 2009/08/26 13:46:45 created_gmt: 2009/08/26 13:46:45 comment_status: open post_name: el-reg-headline-you-all-look-bloody-shifty-to-me-or-why-is-ie-still-our-standard-browser status: publish post_type: post

El Reg headline: You all look bloody shifty to me (or, why is IE still our standard browser?)

Big title there, but given this:

as reported in the UK’s own The Register under the headline MS phishing filter blacklists everything: You all look bloody shifty to me, the question needs to be asked:

“After nearly a decade in which the Mozilla project’s free (as in beer) successor to Netscape Navigator has consistently lead the way in innovation, standards-compliance and functionality over Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, why is IE still the standard browser of not only most of the unwashed masses but also major corporations and institutions who should know better?”

Is it really the same old chicken-and-egg game where unless massive numbers of average Joes and Josephines switch to the clearly better — and free — product, the movers and shakers of the industrial world just can’t “do the right thing”?

Or is it an ideological issue that arises from the executive suites derived from the nearly religious belief that nothing that’s really free could possibly be any good — except that is for tax concessions and government bailouts (although those do require some up-front “greasing of the skids” via political contributions and/or intimidation by astroturfing, not to mention astronomical fees paid to the lawyers)?

Or is it that if the desktop, the choice of browsers in particular, was really to be opened up and massive numbers were actually to choose Mozilla or some other competing browser over IE, then most of the major software publishers in the U.S. and elsewhere would be in deep trouble. They would be in trouble because most, even some of the biggest whose CEO’s have expresses disdain for MS and its products, and who are in active competition with Redmond, have built their products and their support operations with the assumption that IE is the standard..

Like efforts to make software more secure, moving away from IE on the desktop inevitably runs up against the problem posed by big companies, particularly software companies, for whom change is a bottom-line negative — even though changing your Internet browser would cost you nothing.

That and the sad fact that most normal people don’t keep track of how many times their problem getting to where they want, or doing what they want to do, winds up being some bug or other problem with their Internet browser.

Like those millions of British citizens who woke up this morning to find out they couldn’t access any of their government’s web sites because someone at Microsoft decided those web sites are unsafe.

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