Reponse to: http://techdirt.com/articles/20080820/0941022045.shtml
The interesting thing I find is the issue of "compliance" versus majority rule. IE6 was the "standard" with Safari a long second and the original mozilla which was an aweful product that even the linux peeps only used becaused they had to.
Then along comes Firefox, with granted MUCH better security and features. However, from a user experience stand point, it continues to break all the rules:
1. it works differently (displaying pages differently) than what was already in the market place and users hands
2. it causes content and application developers headaches because now there are 3 target platforms: safari, ie and FF.
3. FF3 display differently than FF2. I have pages that work in ie6, 7, FF2, but break in FF3. Yech. What a PIA. Now I have 4 targets.
Think about it this way: the reason Apple is so successful and can build such high quality apps is that at the end of the day, they are a closed, but accessible platform. The hardware and software are all tightly integrated. There is basically one way to do everything. The same goes for game consoles. It is standardization through closed platforms, and this control drastically improves the quality of the experience.
