Rob Pegoraro's editorial, Firefox Leaves No Reason to Endure Internet Explorer, opines that Microsoft became uninterested in it's Internet Explorer.
Perhaps, more damning, is that he believes the only interest Microsoft had in IE was to clean up security holes,
After Microsoft cemented a monopoly of the Web-browser market, it let Internet Explorer go stale, parceling out ho-hum updates that neglected vulnerabilities routinely exploited by hostile Web sites.
First, I'm not sure if I buy into the argument that the IE code is necessarily any more vulnerable than other browsers. It is, by virtue of being the largest share of the browser market, the most exploited browser. However, there are security flaws with every browser, including a problem unique to tabbed browsers like Firefox. Admittedly, with the release of Firefox 1.0, Mozilla has fixed this vulnerability. But the find a risk and then fix method is just the same as what IE does. No developers can find every vulnerability.
The editorial goes on to describe some of the better features of Firefox. Overall, I agree with him that Firefox is a better browser than IE. But three years ago I thought Opera was a better browser than IE. I'm not sure why it never received the attention Firefox is receiving.
The other article at Wapo is that Microsoft's new search falls far short of Google I haven't tried the Microsoft search, but, aagain it isn't like Google is perfect. After all, they didn't update their image search index for months. I think that A9 is a better search site because they use a few different indexes and save your search history for your access.
In all honesty, I do agree with WAPO on both of these accounts. IE is a little annoying, but I think it's quicker than Firefox; Microsoft search doesn't seem like it would impress me.
