OT: You've talked about RSS searchers. What about RSS readers? I think that when Firebird gets web sidebars a lot of new doors will open.

Alan, I haven't done any serious investigation into RSS readers. For the most part, I'm not really interested in reading everything from any particular weblog. I spend my online time reading about specific topics that interest me and I'm less interested in who is doing the posting than I am what they're saying.

There are a few blogs that I visit regularly but it's pretty easy for me to load them all up in tabs from a bookmark folder. If someone builds an "in-content" RSS feed reader like http://www.xulchannels.com/ but which allows me to store my selected feeds locally and set my own style sheets for post display, I'd probably be moved to use it for the handful of blogs I check regularly.

--Asa

Brad Choate is missing one really, really big point. IE isn't there to give people using Windows a good browsing experience. It's there to further an end; specifically, make it as difficult as possible for people to use their computers if they're not running MS software.

MS would never accept Moz or anything else they didn't have total control over as a default part of their OS, because it would lessen their control of the platform and the end user. I don't know why people can't seem to understand this, especially as MS themselves state it from time to time (although they're always careful to explain that they need that level of control to "enhance the end user experience").

Starting in '95 MS tried hard to grab as much control of the use of the Web as they could, and did a pretty decent job of it actually. It's slipping back in the other direction now, but the latest announcements about Longhorn show that they haven't given up by a longshot. We may one day see a Web entirely driven by commoditized open protocols supported by everybody, but I have a feeling it'll only happen over MS' metaphorical dead body.