The Lurker

Browse Happy (because ignorance is bliss)

The people behind the Web Standards Project distanced themselves from one of their projects, "Browse Happy", when they decided that they wanted to be taken seriously.

Fortunately, the good folks at WordPress were happy to take over Browse Happy, a silly little collection of testimonials from people who stopped using Internet Explorer. (One day I'm going to have to rant about WordPress, because it seems like a prolonged exercise in poor judgement too (though obviously an immensely successful project), but right now the wounds are too fresh.)

Now I don't like IE, and outside of a job which ended a little over five years ago now, I've never used it regularly. But this web site, with its ignorant claims about security (yeah, IE has had some incredible flaws, but the rhetoric always seems to imply that other browser developers are somehow immune to human error and bad judgement), and ringing endorsements like To be honest, nothing really frustrated me about IE. I mean, everything is optimized for it, so everything seems to work with it. to persuade you of the righteousness of the cause, just grates.

(And what the hell happened to Firefox, anyway? I switched to Firefox back in the good old days, before it even had a name, let alone a name it had to change for trademark reasons, only to change again because they'd hurt somebody's feelings by not noticing them. I tried it out in the first place because they promised to correct the terrible design decisions forced on the Mozilla browser by Netscape, and to make it faster in the process. These days I'm back using Mozilla again because somehow Firefox ended up being slower again. There aren't any "Switch away from Firefox" sites, though, so maybe it's just me.)

Related topics: Web Mindless Link Propagation