Who’s afraid of Mozillas? Its scary, lets face it.

Switching to a new browser.

I have about 200 items in my favorite places file on MSIE and those are just the ones I’m “meaning to get to”, there are another 400 or so that I have been accumulating over the years.

I have a bunch of blogs I’d like to read but I just don’t have time to go to each one individually and when I do, they are not always updated. I need a service that gives me a new homepage and puts my most important links and the option to scan for other stuff such as blogs. I know there are a bunch of great services out there - but what the geeks in the know keep telling me is to switch to Mozzilla and to use Newsmonster.

The thing is, Mozilla is a whole new browser. Now, I am not afraid of downloading new stuff, its just that, Microsoft stuff works pretty well and anything that has the words “open source”, “Unix”, “Linux”, has a PayPal donation icon on its homepage or any weird combobulated method of reporting bugs scares me.

I’ve downloaded a number of these things in the past and they usually turn out to be junk. Say what you will about Microsoft, Bill’s stuff works for 99.9% of the people it is meant for: people who want to spend more time working and less time configuring, etc. On the other hand, I have gotten some great software that is freeware, cheapware or whatever - back when I played Ultima Online there was this utility called easiest that was awesome- I think it was $10 a year or something.

I have the problem of being in geek limbo - I'm a geek, it’s true, you have to be if you start a dot com (that actually worked) in 1994 and you are a member of Generation X who grew up with Commodore 64s, TI99s, Apple 2cs and Digital Rainbows. Of course I am a Gen X geek -the problem is - I am not quite ENOUGH of a geek to really be into this funky world of Mozilla and Firefox and Unix and whatever - but just enough of a geek to actually know these things exist and to care to give it a try. I need my computer to make a living and want it to actually do stuff and enjoy the results a heck of a lot more than the process of setting things up.

So what do I do? I buy Microsoft stuff - I run MS everything. Does this mean I get ripped off? Sure, there's probably a free solution for everything from the operating system to the browser to whatever else. Does this mean I am not getting the best program? Probably that too. But I can’t spend $600 worth of my time to save $200 on a piece of software that might not be compatible with our business partners or might not even work. I can’t tell you how many die hard "real" geeks have laughed at me for using FrontPage for my websites. I've probably "programmed" 2000 pages of content using MS FrontPage. The die hards say my code looks like crap and if anyone clicks "view source" they will know it wasn't made by a member of the Vulcan High Council of MIT grads. But guess what? When my customers come to the site it looks fine and the people clicking "view source" ain’t putting food on my table. They laugh when I tell em I use FrontPage but they usually stop if I ask them if their site actually generates any revenue.

So here I stand - in geek limbo - I have my Franklin Edition Boba Fett Sculpture looking down at me from above the Ninja Lego’s on my office shelf, I've got the 30 some odd domain names, the desktop filled with icons, the comic book collection in the closet and the blog I am posting on now. BUT I also have MS everything and the aforementioned AOL account. I stand on the knife's edge of geeky by default and true geeky. Do I cross in to geek domain forever?

I'll give it a shot and see what Mozilla is all about.

  ¶ 5:15 PM