Trolls and Fanboys

I was poring over Slashdot today (as nerds are want to do when they procrastinate),
where I found an interesting article about Microsoft working with Mozilla to make firefox work better with Windows Vista.

In between all the usual rantings and zealotry, there was an interesting idea raised -

"Are Microsoft planning to ship Firefox with Vista?"

Initially, I just Auto-Snorted and read on... But then later I came back to think about it...


You know, if Microsoft (MSFT) is really serious about being seen as a company that's about innovation - one that is about embracing great ideas, this would be the perfect way to leave all those crazy slashdotters gaping slackjawed in their tracks. To regain a bit of the market trust that they lost. To get people to like the company more - maybe the way they feel about other giant companies...

All that anti-trust stuff, lock-in and lock down stuff would just be blown away if they would include, on equal footing, the open-source browser as an option to users of Vista. It's not anti-competitive. No competitor could possibly gain from it (the mozilla foundation is a not-for-profit organisation) and it couldn't possibly harm any user, who was free to choose which browser they liked best. And what a great way to prove that you support web standards, instead of trying to mangle them for your own advantage...

Oh, and it could make the lives of web-developers the world over so much easier. Like this guy.

So, you know, maybe it's not such a crazy idea after all. Come on then Microsoft, lets see you step up and prove it to us once and for all that you really do support innovation, and you're not just trying to lock us all into Internet Explorer - ship Firefox with Vista.

Hey, It might happen...