Keith Devens .com

Assume for a minute that the Mozilla team (a loose organization of developers) puts as much time into debugging Firebird's innards as Microsoft does IE's. This would include not just paid developers, but the untold masses who are using the product.

With these assumptions in mind, how many security-related patches have been released for Firebird?

Of course, Firebird patches aren't going to be as necessary as patches to IE because Firebird is not part of the Windows OS. But putting Firebird into IE's shoes might yield just as many security problems. We won't know about this until Firebird is integrated into Windows and the installed user base is larger than a handful of "knowledgeable" people and their converted followers.

Also until then, nobody will really complain about Firebird's clunky interface (Opera is still the best in my judgement, but that's another story) or poor, poor script support. CSS support may be better (I'm still not ready to concede on that point, in spite of sporadic evidence I keep running into) but I'm left wondering why CSS is so important when all of the promises of usefulness it provides really don't gain anything for me, specifically.