Chris

Not sure where that guy is coming from ...

Firstly, the issue of facing threats. The standard defence against Microsoft is that its products are only compromised as often as they are because they are the popular products and there to be shot at by the majority. Everybody else's stuff would fare as badly, so the story goes, if only it got the same level of attention. This may or may not be true, but considering it is complete supposition, totally undemonstrated as a theory, I'm not comfortable with the frequency it gets trotted out. It is a lazy excuse for a defence of Microsoft that, tellingly, doesn't even attempt to defend MS, but instead, without proof, attepts to pull everyone else down to their level. If you stick to the cold hard facts, Microsoft has a lamentable security record, and a poor corporate reputation for security that is derived from more than just the number of patches it has to issue.

Second, over the issue of non-standard code (and I will need some technical back-up or rebuttal here, because now I'm supposing a little): How can MS develop a browser to take account of the use of non-standard code? With Netscape in the pre-eminent position, non-standard code simply couldn't work. You write non-standard code, no-one can read your pages, so you don't write non-standard code in the first place. In fact, given that Hypertext was invented, more or less, by one man, the concept of non-standard code is, in the early days of the web at least, totally absurd. There can only be non-standard code if someone *creates* it, and then allows it to function in certain browsers but not others. To put it simply, M$ doubly shafted Netscape firstly by *creating* the non-standard code, which would only work on IE, then bundling IE with Windows, then by marketing it aggressively at the IT community.