Looked at a couple of interesting, new web services yesterday: Jotspot (a wiki for the masses) and Mappr (a geography-based photo album). Lots of potential. I enjoyed reading the kid's version of Small Pieces Loosely Joined ('A Unified Theory of the Web', or 'What the Web is For'). Good stuff.

I don't think anyone would argue the fact that Firefox/Mozilla proponents routinely wield a double-edged sword that can only hurt themselves in the future. They always seem to highlight the fact that IE is insecure even after MS releases a patch for a particular hole, and how that even though a patch is available, the majority of IE users never patched their systems (like that's MS's fault or something). In other words, they're saying that it's still MS's fault that a virus infected so many systems, despite the fact that a patch has been out for weeks or months.

This lame (and flawed) argument can only hurt them. Why? Because if their lesser-known alternative browsers ever did actually become popular with 'non-techie' folks (9 out of 10 web surfers), then the same exact thing would happen to them. New Firefox vulnerabilities would, of course, be discovered, and despite any team efforts at issuing timely patches (whether it's within minutes, hours, days, or weeks - it doesn't matter), no one would ever go get them. Whichever version was originally installed on their machine would be the one they would always use for the next five years until they got a new computer - there would be no patches, no upgrades, no newer versions, no nightly builds, no latest milestones -ever- for the majority of users.

In summation, if they can't build it perfect the first time (which we all know they can't), they shouldn't complain about Microsoft, because they're in the exact same boat. Their whole "we patch faster than MS" argument is entirely irrelevant and useless. In fact, the only thing all their rantings have done, in essence, is to speed up the delivery of Internet Explorer 7.0 beta this summer. So, in that regard, I thank them!

I was perusing Anil Dash's archives and ran across a truly scary photo of Michael Jackson. Jeremy Zawodny has a funny post about spell-checking. <grin />