Stupid ebay/amazon question

Ben Scott dragonhawk at gmail.com
Thu Jul 6 15:14:37 EDT 2006


On 7/6/06, Bill McGonigle <bill at bfccomputing.com> wrote:
>>  Well, since you bring it up, Firefox's "Extensions" are very similar
>> to ActiveX in this regard.  Both will auto-download programs to your
>> computer.
>
> One difference worth noting is there aren't websites (statistically, at
> least) that require a Firefox Extension to be downloaded and installed
> to view the content of the website.

  Sure, but that's not by design.  There's nothing in inherent in any
of the browsers or interfaces that causes that.  It's just that we
haven't had a huge swarm of incompetent software designers targeting
Firefox.  Yet.  If Firefox comes to dominate (i.e., gains the 75+%
that MSIE has now), you can bet we'll have that, too.  Crap software
seems to be the rule, not the exception.

  I've already encountered a crappy government webapp that requires a
Mozilla-derived browser to work properly.  Turns out it doesn't feel
so good to see bad design being perpetrated under the Mozilla banner,
either...

> Rue the day that Firefox lets you run a new Extension without
> restarting the browser...

  Why?

-- Ben



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