[Techtalk] Mozilla v. Firefox

[Carla Schroder]

On Tuesday 25 January 2005 11:28 pm, Kai MacTane wrote:
> At 1/25/05 09:18 PM , Carla Schroder wrote:

> >So another way of asking the question is how do you avoid getting 
> >locked-in to a particular platform? ... Can you really design complex Web 
> >applications to be browser-agnostic?
> 
> Oh, I understand now. My advice on this is, "Sure! Write to the standards." 
> And this is even, to some extent, possible. Okay, where JavaScript 
> (ECMAscript, etc.) is concerned, you essentially have to support two 
> platforms: MSIE, and everything else. But Google is proving that it *can* 
> be done, and interesting things can be done with it.
> 
> Of course, this is all really easy for me to say when I don't have an 
> actual list of requirements sitting in front of me... Is the question 
> purely hypothetical, or do you have a particular project in mind?
> 

No, this is just general musings on a number of issues:

1. Migrating away from IE when you have spent years happily building apps to 
IE 
2. Wising up to the existence of users on other platforms
3. Escaping vendor lock-in

For businesses who have years of infrastructure locked into MS, these are big 
deals. I am pretty much out of sympathy after beating my head on the IE wall 
all these years as an end user- honest to gosh, what's so hard to understand 
about "I want to be your customer, but you have erected this large barrier, 
and ironically it was never intended to be a barrier."

So I'm wondering how big a job these IE-only shops are faced with to climb out 
of the hole they've dug themselves into, and how big a job is writing 
cross-platform Web apps. Because even for internal apps that never the leave 
the company intranet, locking yourself into MS/IE seems like a real bad idea. 
You're painting yourself into a corner. It seems like everything is being 
piggybacked onto HTTP these days, and it makes sense- why muck with client 
apps when you have a nice universal client available?


-- 
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Carla Schroder
http://www.tuxcomputing.com
check out my new book, the "Linux Cookbook", the ultimate Linux user's 
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