Winer Sees Light?

This isn’t really a dig at Dave Winer, really:

Last week I found myself in a new apartment, a permanent address at last, and a laptop that’s so riddled with spyware as to be unusable. While watching Katrina on CNN and MSNBC, I ran all the spyware removal tools I had, they’re known to work, but then I couldn’t bring myself to launch MSIE, because that’s how the spyware comes back. Then I had an epiphany. I didn’t use Firefox on this computer in the past because it was so strange, so different from MSIE as to be jarring Dave Winer, Easing into Firefox

What? Jarring???

IE has an address bar, Firefox has an address bar – check. IE stores book marks, has history, and so does Firefox – check. Both allow you to browse web sites.

But IE has hidden, extra special features one might miss. For example, IE allows malicious websites to continually infect your computer – while you use the tool normally, and does so even for someone like Dave who has his wits about him – check.

You’ll miss out of most of this pain with Firefox, and that could be jarring for some. Firefox one does a terrific job at isolating users, even smart users, from the worst nasties of the web – check.

For that simple reason alone (forget all the other great features of Firefox including tabbed browsing, the search bar, shortcuts, Grease Monkey, etc) folks like Dave who know what they are doing, or like my Mom (switched!) who doesn’t, should have switched eons ago.

Dave, you didn’t have an epiphany, you just decided to get with the program. We can guess, perhaps incorrectly, that you’d have done it earlier but a form of not invented here kept you from following the crowd. In this case, the crowd had the epiphany, well over a year ago. Welcome to the party.

Here’s the real point of this note: if smart, influential, people like Dave Winer are willing to put up with a piece of crap bit of software (Microsoft Internet Explorer), what hope do software consumers have of seeing better, safer, applications?

Its simply too bad that Dave didn’t use his position of influence to perhaps swing the folks at Microsoft over, earlier. They are well along the way, no thanks to Dave on that one, through the efforts of the web standards community (another group which Dave rather actively fought early on) and from designers who just got fed up with dealing with Microsoft.

At any rate, progress is good, even if late.