nasserd wrote: Most notably, it would require every other website to redesign ITSELF to support Firefox, as opposed to Firefox supporting websites. IE for instance, supports websites.
This is because Firefox (and the rest of the Mozilla codebase) was written to support W3C standards, which do not include many of Microsoft's additions. This puts Firefox ahead in some aspects (better support of CSS2, support for PNG transparency) than Internet Explorer, but makes pages designed for Internet Explorer occasionally incompatible with Firefox, ranging from minor errors in page layout to complete inability to render a given page.
Users of non-IE browsers, though, make up at least 10% of the market (Safari, Konquerer, Mozilla, Netscape, Opera), and they have been able to slowly push a number of sites to move from IE-only to support non-IE browsers. My bank and credit card companies both, early on, supported only IE, but eventually redesigned things such that non-IE browsers worked just fine on them, and now there is no difference in the user experience. There's still a reason to keep IE around -- I still use it for a handful of pages -- but by and large, most sites work just fine with Firefox, and hopefully its expanded use will encourage more site developers to use existing standards, and encourage Microsoft to better support the standards.
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