Evangelism

Justin switched to Mozilla Firefox due to some sort of persistent crash bug in Internet Explorer that had been nagging him, and after I have long been trying to convince him to use Mozilla, he has accepted Firefox as the better browser.

All is well, but now the missionary has come about in Justin. Not content with just using the browser, he must now spread the gospel of Firefox. In his post, he urges everybody to switch, specifically to his case because he likes the assortment of powerful extensions available.

I have reason to want others to use a standard compliant browser because I code web pages. Internet Explorer's stubborn lack of support for technologies like CSS1 and Javascript, both published as formal web standards in 1996, nearly a decade ago, combined with its inexplicably high marketshare (inexplicably meaning the U.S. did not find Microsoft to be a monopoly) are very frustrating when trying to make a decent web design.

Justin, on the other hand, just loves the UI. He could hardly care less about a shit renderer as long as he can see web pages (usually tailored toward Internet Explorer only because of market share). What brought him in was at first a bug, but what kept him liking Firefox was an excellent interface. Justin's choice was based on the way he uses the browser, not how anybody else uses their's.

In other words, I am a printer, whereas Justin is an evangelist.

Scenario One
Me (playing the printer)
Praise the lord!
Peasant
Praise the lord!
Me
Here's a Bible—first one's on the house.
Peasant
Praise the lord!
Me
Tell your friends about Jesus. And the Bible. Mention the Bible. And me. Meanwhile, can I interest you in some dime novels?
Scenario Two
Justin (as the evangelist)
Praise the lord!
Peasant
Praise the lord!
Justin
Praise the lord!
Peasant
Praise the lord!
Justin
Praise the lord!
Peasant
Praise the lord!
Justin
Praise the lord!
Peasant
Praise the lord!
Justin
Praise the lord!
Peasant
Praise the lord!
Justin
Praise the lord!

Justin has turned into a born-again Christian. He was saved, and now everybody has to hear about it.

Well, maybe not a Christian, but Mozilla is a religion. Point Mozilla or one of its derivitives (Firefox, Netscape) at about:mozilla and you will get a passage from the Book of Mozilla. For those of you lacking such a browser, I recommend using one, but in case you for some reason cannot use one or you just want to see the text immediately, here is a transcript:

And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.

from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15

Of course, no religion is complete without an adversary, because any other situation would mean that the Messiah had already come. Visiting the same address (about:mozilla) is Internet Explorer shows a friendly blue screen. It is a joke from when Mozilla was the project code name for Netscape, and since Netscape and Microsoft were in direct competition, the Microsoft developers claimed that Netscape caused a blue screen of death (system crash).

Where shall I begin disclaiming this? I certainly will not say that old versions of Netscape were any good, because they certainly were not, but how about the fact that Microsoft built an operating system so prone to crashes (Windows 95 [Ed. (me) – * shudders *]) that users should associate a solid blue background for a web page with a total crash. And isn't the OS partially at fault for Netscape's crashes? One thing I know is that when an application crashes it is isolated to that specific application, but when Internet Explorer crashes it restarts Windows Explorer.

Old browsers aside, Mozilla is currently extremely stable. Version 1.7b, which I am using now, is extremely stable, and it's a beta. The current "stable branch" is pretty much completely crash-bug free, which despite being an older, more tortoise-esque browser, is still years ahead of the latest Internet Explorer, and is much more stable. Firefox, a browser that has not even had its 1.0 release yet, it being accepted as the browser of choice by people like Justin.

In summary, to be a good Christian:

Firefox - Take Back the Web

And as a side note: this was originally going to be a short link-list style post. I think I went a bit over the top, but I too am a religious man.

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This was written on Wednesday, April 14, 2004 by Lenny.

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