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Julian Hall wrote: > > So you have probably a UK user, techie and views the BBC Technical News > section and could be bothered to vote. Not a massive pool to draw from > when you consider how many users there are on the internet who do *not* > fill the above criteria. Currently just under 40,000 votes. But my figures suggest that the more technically literate, or simply educated, the audience of a website, the more likely they are to use something other than IE. Also observed that the wealthier they are, and the more interested in design, the more likely they are to use Safari (In other news "dog bites man"). Bizarrely Mike Ward's comparison of Firefox 2 and IE 7 doesn't mention security at all. http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6086798.stm Of course the weakness announced in IE7 on day one, wasn't really a new weakness, but one reported to Microsoft in April and also affecting IE5 and IE6, and still not fixed. A minor issue, but it cuts to the heart of the security debate, as the weakness is in an ActiveX control shipped with a different Microsoft product (Outlook Express), and which I understand is installed on pretty much every MS desktop. http://secunia.com/advisories/19738 So despite Microsoft switching "off by default" a load of ActiveX controls, they still managed to leave enabled ones with known issues (all be it a relatively minor issue). The ActiveX control in question is effectively obsolete, but people who wrote web pages that use it will need to rewrite them. So the usual issues of monoculture, ActiveX, and backward compatibility, mean it is likely to be "business as usual" despite Microsoft's alleged commitment to better security. The real innovation goes on around the edges, not on the centre stage. It is interesting to see how many ideas from Kazehakase finally made it into Firefox with the version 2 release. The really potent stuff coming from Mozilla is the rendering engine, not the applications. Not that the applications aren't really good, but building big stuff means one can't innovate as readily. And yes, the only IE7 feature mentioned n the review that Firefox is missing is available as an extension, and has been for a while.
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