Dan's Opinion:

The Microsoft Browser

This page is a little outdated, I wrote it a few years back. In some ways however, the more things change the more they stay the same. Now instead of oddball extentions to HTML, Microsoft touts ActiveX and VB script. The intent on their part is still the same. Henry Ford is often quoted as having said "You can have any color car you want, as long as it's black." I believe the same is more or less true of Bill Gates: "You can have any kind of computer you want, as long as it runs only Microsoft software."

The Netscape vs. Microsoft debate/battle/blood feud has ceased to have much meaning anyway, since (A) Netscape is no longer a soverign corporate entity and (B) I have moved all of my computing needs over to Linux and FreeBSD. I have one NT machine on which I play games, read other people's Word files (I haven't had the initiative to look at StarOffice yet), and of course run the distributed.net client. I have finally gotten Microsoft almost completely out of my life.

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Internet Explorer is an attempt by Microsoft to grab an even huger piece of the market then they already have. The "Microsoft Extentions" to the HTML standard are not and should not be supported by any other browser. Anyone using those extentions is tayloring their web site for one and only one group: Microsoft customers. Anyone interested in the rest of the world, the majority of which is using non-Microsoft browsers, should avoid the Microsoft HTML tags like the plague.

As for the browser itself, it lacks the mature and well-developed set of features available in either the Netscape or the NCSA browsers. Why would anyone settle for Internet Explorer when there are better tools available for free?

With that said, here is a link to the Microsoft web site should you feel the need to visit them.

I did at one point have a plan to list some sites devoted to all things anti-microsoft, and believe you me there was no shortage of them. They are however by and large so spiteful and hate-filled that there is a precious lack of actual useful information, such as alternative software packages that really work and the fact that OS/2 had most of the features of Windows 95 in 1994 and is still quite a bit more reliable.

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