> Surely linux is becoming the car sales lot of operating
> system, there enough
> distro and distro version of application software out there to
> confuse a geek
> (as the car sales lot confuses the car buyer). At least with
> windows you have
> a flat playing field (you several playing fields, 98, me,
> 2000, XP, 2003,
> Vista etc.), if you design a web app for windows IE you have a
> good chance
> that it will work on all versions of windows. Can you say the
> same for the
> various different distro of linux and all their
> idyosynchrocies(sp) I think
> by going down the Iceweasel route is just going to confuse the
> issue further.
>
Speaking as a new user the huge array of software with all their various
forks and extensions can be really be confusing. Although I'm really
enjoying exploring all this specialised stuff for free! I can totally
understand the theoretical standpoint taken up by Debian (even though
I've heard they protect their own trademarks)... but I don't see
anything malicious or really restrictive in this move by Firefox,
ensuring that Firefox is properly identifiable to people is a good
thing. I like to know what I'm getting and who its from. (I've made a
bit of an assumption there as to why they have protected the use of
their logo). And I think you can freely redistribute Firefox (with logo
etc) as source code without any restrictions... not that new users like
me would be very appreciative of having to dive straight into the
command line.
But I'm really not too bothered if there are a million different
browsers just so long as they all render web pages the same way... I've
being doing lots of cross-browser web development recently and it can
really get frustrating when seemingly none of them stick to the
standards!
I think what I'm saying is that the huge array of programs only becomes
confusing and frustrating to users if they are not all standards
compliant or compatible with each other. If your a new user and your
browser lets you surf the web without messing up pages then why would
you care whether it has a cute little weasel or a cute little fox on it?
Ok, there's my little rant
PS. Ice Weasel has a cooler logo
Cal
