Gecko Bloggle

3 Responses to “Some time in June, Mozilla’s going to try breaking a record.”

1. stephanie Says:
   June 1st, 2008 at 7:50 am

   Is it me? Or are browsers trendy now? I use Firefox at home because everyone was like, oh, you have to use Firefox or you suck. But I think Internet Explorer 7 is kind of better. For me, anyway. At work, we use Safari. I just don’t know.

2. Zen Render Says:
   June 1st, 2008 at 11:38 am

   I think there’s been “trendiness” in browsing since the days of Lynx and Mosaic. I remember it being 92/93 and running Windows 3.1, firing up Mosaic and loading the Altavista page (Or maybe it was a search engine before that? Google? No Google.) and realizing I could go ANYWHERE. And there were PICTURES.

   WAY easier than Archie searches and Telnetting from place to place.

   Not long after, Internet Explorer showed up, and it seemed like this was the way to go. Windows 95 arrived, and with IE built-in, it was a no-brainer – people just used what they already had at their fingertips.

   I think a lot of the trendiness is based on what people like. What they’re comfortable with. What works for them. If you were doing all of your online banking in a particular browser, and then it broke starting tomorrow, you’d find something else, and use that, but you probably wouldn’t use the “other” browser for everything, just for banking.

   Me? I like Firefox, but I’m not “sold” on V3 yet. The main thing I use FFox for now is reading feeds, and THAT is being done with a RSS/Atom feed reader named Sage, and if it weren’t for that, I probably wouldn’t care much. Opera does some neat things (widgets, from a browser?), and IE is the assumed browser on most sites. Safari will become more popular, now that Apple has bundled it into the software updater in iTunes/Quicktime (sneaky, btw).

   I figure if it does what you want, and doesn’t crash or open your system to outside attack (or help you mess up your own machine), then it’s fine. Whatever you want, you want.

   I *do* see more trending towards people spending inordinate amounts of time “tricking out” their systems so everything looks cooler/scarier/prettier/grungier, and browsers are part of that.

   Of course, customization is what mutated MySpace from a passable social network site into a psychotic mess of animated wallpapers and self-launching music players, so maybe having TOO much choice isn’t always a good thing.

   For a little reading, there’s a neat timeline of Web Broswer here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_web_browsers

3. Zen Render Says:
   June 1st, 2008 at 11:39 am

   Note to self: don’t write comments longer than original post, unless the first comment is also longer then the original. :)

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