Not Too Late to Celebrate

By Shannon Cochran

June 17, 2002

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The music was loud; the cocktails were plentiful; the big screen over the dance floor displayed source code streaming by, and underneath people in Linux and EFF t-shirts were getting down. At the San Francisco party marking the release of Mozilla 1.0, nobody seemed to really mind that the project took four years to complete, or that, in the meantime, Internet Explorer claimed 90 percent of the market.

"Considering the general failure of the dot-com industry," said attendee Dan Sneddon, who was wearing a floppy disk storing Netscape 1.0 on a strap around his neck, "any small successes should be celebrated with absolute fervor."

The landscape has been pretty bleak for those who, for whatever reason, won't use IE. Netscape displays most pages okay; it also crashes at least once a session, and persists in needling its audience with user-hostile features. Given half a chance, Netscape will litter AOL icons across your desktop, display a Netscape advertising page every time you check your mail, and clog your hard drive with unwelcome programs like Net2Phone ("FREE PC-to-Phone calls anywhere within the US!" they blare. In the fine print: "Free calls placed within the U.S. from your PC to any phone are currently limited to 5 minutes.")

Then there are the other browsers. Opera sounds nice, but it comes with a price: You can choose to pay either with your money ($39) or with your attention (by accepting built-in advertisements). Linux-based browsers such as Konqueror offer a user interface that, in comparison with Netscape, seems like the soul of sweet relief — but there's a significant minority of pages that they simply can't handle properly. Oh, and every now and then, when I don't actually care about seeing any content, I like to browse with Amaya. The W3C's unforgivingly standards-compliant browser renders most pages into an illegible mess, but you do get the satisfaction of knowing that you are, in some abstract and impractical way, right.

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