Blog Moved!

Being a computer scientist, I’m irrationally proud about which applications I’ll allow myself to use.  So, upon discovering a site which required Internet Explorer to load properly, I tried everything I could think of to force it to display in a real browser—Firefox.  After burning through half an hour and about fifteen Firefox plug-ins, I finally gave in and fired up IE 8.  That’s when my mind was blown.

It's like I'm not even here anymore.

The browser wasn’t anything special—which absolutely amazed me.  Literally every feature that I like about Firefox is implemented in Explorer in a way that feels oddly familiar.  Considering those same features were initially developed in the open-source community, Microsoft’s teams of highly-paid engineers apparently failed to design a better web experience than a group of (often unpaid) volunteers.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised to see a major corporation play catch-up; open-sourcing a project seems to be the more efficient way to collect and implement new ideas.