cat >/dev/null_

I left a comment on a story on digg about Firefox being close to 10% adoption:

1 in 10 is still not much. But look at it this way. IE was MS’s move to get hold of the Internet as a platform. Not only they have not succeeded, thank the Lord, recently they also seem to be lagging. We all can see how the latest trends in web development focus on open standards, as it should be.

It does not really matter that software is free (as in whatever) as much as it matters that it’s compliant to open, unencumbered, interoperable standards (even if, as we all know, free software stands much better chances to be so inclined). In that respect, the importance of Firefox (and similar projects like Opera and KHTML) goes way beyond the percentage points of their adoption figures.

Of course this is not to say that those numbers should not grow or that I do not wish it to be so. Quite the contrary. If future releases of IE should turn into something different than the blatantly insecure, incompatible-by-design mess it is today, I’d have much less problems with it. But I seriously doubt to see it happen anytime soon.