Wednesday, November 17, 2004

Too little, too late, too expensive!

Microsft have reacted to Firefox with the Windows Marketplace - your one-stop shop for Internet Explorer Add-ons. (As long as you are using IE on Windows) For only $30 you can buy a popup blocker, a few more bucks for a Download Manager, and splurge the rest of your money on a skin which might give you tabbed browsing.
Result? A browser which has at least some of the features of Firefox, for only slightly less money than an upgrade to Windows XPSP2.
How stable and secure your browser will be is another matter.
On the main Windows Marketplace Page, one of the entries in the 'Most popular categories' section is 'Adware removal tools': once computer sellers and ISPs realise they can ship a branded Firefox installation (at minimal cost) and save hugely on support costs (because of the absence of spyware/adware problems) they will follow Netscape and hopefully laugh all the way to the bank. What goes around comes around.. there used to be a guide to branding Netscape, but it probably went south with devedge - there's a tutorial for deployment (in a corporate environment, say) here.

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