On Sun, 13 Jul 2003 11:54:38 -0400, "mto" <nobody@nowhere.com> wrote:


>Visited your site last night Sponge. Great info. I do have to take
>exception with you on one little thing though. Mozilla may be a very
secure
>browser (I haven't bothered with it in years) but the point is that
96% of
>all internet users currently use IE. FAR too many of them are highly
>insecure about changing anything at all on their machines out of some
>misguided fear they will break the thing. I have one client that
pays me
>$50 an hour to travel to his home to do things like uncheck the box
in OE
>that says "hang up when finished" - and it has taken me 2 years to
get him
>to the point where he will call me and follow instructions to do
things like
>that himself. He is not unusual by a long shot.
>
>The browser war is over. Bill won. Even to the point that nearly
all

Thanks for the compliments on my site. Much appreciated.
I don't dispute that M$ is #1 in the browser war. You are absolutely
right, they won. You're also correct that getting some people to
switch to a new browser is like asking them to give up their
firstborn. But IE is far from mandatory. I have only seen one or two
sites EVER that positively required IE. I have been denied access to a
site only once, in the last many years, because I was using a non-IE
browser. (I was using Netscape 4.79 at the time.)
In fact, I've been using Opera (impersonating IE 5.0) for about the
past 8 months and rarely have a problem with it, either, and it's far
less mainstream than Netscape/Mozilla. When I do have problems, it's
usually either because I have Proxomitron deliberately misreporting
the browser type as "SpaceBison v0.95" and the OS as Windows 67k,
which is Proxo's default settings when set to falsify browser type, or
because of the unusually aggressive (and experimental) filters I'm
using with Proxo..
So, using IE is far from mandatory. Sure, it's the most popular
browser, definitely. But there doesn't seem to be any number of
websites deliberately excluding people who don't use IE. And I have
yet to see any websites really render improperly due to the use of a
non-IE browser. About the only thing you'd miss are game sites that
use ActiveX, and you can always fire up IE just for that.
The point is also that, just because 85% of the public is leaving
themselves open to hackers, hijacks, and exploits, doesn't mean you
have to. Every day I read post after post and email after email, all
saying the same thing, like, "What's this f^#king new toolbar?" and
"Help, my computer's been hijacked!". But I surf on peacefully,
knowing that I don't have to sweat the problems these other folks are
sweating. If IE were the only browser on the market or if every
websites mandated the use of IE, then people might be forced to use
IE. Neither one is the case, however, so you can use
Mozilla/Netscape/Opera/whatever freely and without much concern as to
accessibility.

Incidentally, do you have WMP 9 installed? I *might* have found a new,
severe flaw in IE and WMP 9, but I want to check it out further to be
sure it really IS a flaw.

Sponge
Sponge's Anti-Spyware Source
www.geocities.com/yosponge