I USE FIREFOX

I have officially migrated my primary web browsing to FireFox. I am one of the old salts on the internet and was using mosiac when it was first released from UIUC, then I started using netscape from "Mosaic Communications Corporation" before they changed their name to netscape. I didn't care for them converting netscape to a commercial product so when Microsoft released IE and it started to become the browser of all browsers, I switched to IE. I thought Netscape was on crack when they developed mozilla.org and the first mozillas were still slow and bloated and IE browsed circles around them. But now, after resisting and resisting waiting for the next "new and improved IE" and having the IE7 beta BLOW UP on me, I decided to 'test' firefox. Well it's funny. One of the things that made netscape superior to mosaic was that it loaded pages so much faster and soon mosaic was no longer the browser of choice, netscape was (even if it was a commercial software program). Eventually IE loaded pages so much faster than Netscape and netscape was no longer the browser of choice. Now comes FireFox and Firefox is without question the fastest browser I've ever used and with the number of extensions available for it I have some great features that even IE7 doesn't have. So I guess we've gone full circle returning to an open source browser once again. Interesting this technology of ours…

Microsoft is clearly making an attempt at promoting opensource applications that use their tools and run on their platform, CommunityServer, DotNetNuke, and the starter kits are clear examples of this. I stumbled on the ASP.net 2.0 commerce starter kit last night and have to say it’s pretty darn nice. It’s the work of http://www.wekeroad.com and is just in it’s infancy compared to some of the other applications out there. One of the great features of this application is that it’s been backed by Microsoft and PayPal and works with PayPal Pro right out of the gate. For the past 10 years I’ve a great deal of working with e-commerce and in fact wrote my own shopping cart application 10 years ago in Perl and MySQL and can attest to the great joy and pain associated with such a task. Back in 99 when appliedi.net was founded, it was founded to cater to e-commerce based sites and continues to do this today with over 80% of it’s clients being ecommerce based sites. I can honestly say that a decent opensource (read free) ASP.net based shopping cart does not exist, there are a couple outstanding ASP.net based commercial apps (BVcommerce and Storefront) but many clients are put off by these applications because of their cost.