Sorry

I notice you are using MSIE.

In case you didn't know, Microsoft is a monopolistic company which not only shoves (usually) inferior software down people's throats, but also do their best to drive their competitors out of business (that's when they can't buy them out). While I wrote this paragraph 3 years ago, as of 1999/11/09, the US government has officially declared Microsoft a monopoly, so apparently other people agreed with me.

In a few words, microsoft is to software what mc donalds (if you wonder, my shift and caps lock keys are still operational) is to gourmet food (to fully appreciate this sentence, you should note that I am French, and that many french people were outraged that mc donalds was allowed to use the sacred word restaurant for their cardboard food).

I am a happy Linux user, but I do not claim linux is the answer to everything, or the OS for everyone, no OS is. There are other alternatives like FreeBSD or BeOS to name only a couple. Linux has already proven that it's a perfect server OS, and it's doing better everyday on the desktop side. It's still missing some desktop applications, but this also being worked on.

I do think that windows is one of the worse solutions out there: it is still at best a very badly designed and unstable OS, and it definitely doesn't fit my definition of user friendly (on windows, if there ain't no checkbox for it, you can't do it. This means that other people have decided for you what they think you ought to be able to do).
Millions of people have unfortunately accepted the fact that computers do crash frequently, and don't expect computers to be able to do any better. They have no idea that with a well written OS, computers can run for months, if not years without crashing and this is definitely Microsoft's and Apple's fault.

The way I see things, windows is not going to get better, but only worse because it's too big, has too much legacy cruft and has therefore become impossible to maintain.
Another rather big problem is that when marketting has too much control on what features the program should have, and when it should ship, it leads to disasters, and you may end up with source code like this

Anyway, going back to the browser issue, my main concern here is that microsoft pretty much succeeded in driving the former Netscape out of business by using their monopoly position (and money). The more people use IE, the more the development of the Netscape browser will be slowed down.
There may be a some hope on the horizon since Netscape decided to release source code to the Netscape browser, which allowed people to create the Mozilla project, but it's not exactly finished yet.

Microsoft couldn't care less about multi-platform support, actually they're doing everything they can to prevent multi-platform products, like trying to corrupt Java from Sun by making a version that produces code that will only work on windows. They also give away HTML creators that produce HTML in their purposely corrupted version of the ISO 8859-1 character set, and as a result those documents are not well viewable on anything else than windows.

Yes, I know about IE for Solaris, but even if they were going to put out a version for Linux, I wouldn't want to use it because:

• They already can't program on their own platform, namely windows, so I can't expect them to put out a correct Unix application
• If they ever were to put out a Linux version, it would be to get rid of competing browser products, and once they have yet another monopoly, nothing could prevent them from stopping the non windows versions to force people to use what they call an OS.
• I do not need a browser that's twice as big and twice as unstable, thankyouverymuch

But this browser issue is almost a detail compared to all the other deeds Microsoft is responsible for, Netscape is only one casualty among many.

What is your opinion on the subject:

• I don't care about netscape's fate and I think that IE, like other microsoft products is good and reliable

• I am using windows and/or IE because that's what came with my computer/that's what I have to use at my company

• I swear, I never use windows, or even less IE, you see, it's just that I have to use that collegue's/friend's computer for now but otherwise, I always use Linux (substitute your favorite non ms OS here), and support Netscape, and I sincerely hope that windoze won't be running my TV, microwave, and fridge in a couple of years.

99/08/08 (20:53): Version 2.1 Made the anti-ie warning _even_ more obvious due to complaints (some people got really pissed, jeez...). Reworked the outdated part on netscape since NS did lose and disappeared :-(
99/11/09 (22:33): Version 2.2. MS is now an official monopoly, moved link from linux.org to linux.com
99/11/18 (21:52): Version 3.0. Rewrote large portions of the page and removed the code that crashes IE and windows. Changed logos displayed at the top