I love open source products. I love the way they branch out and provide competition for each other from the same base code. I love the way the software is generally released often and I love the way that user feedback is the driving force behind the majority of changes.

Now I have another reason to love open source software. It forces proprietary software to evolve… even against the will of the author of that software.

I have long contended that in the future when we speak of Firefox in a historical sense the only benefit we will remember will be that it made IE better. I just didn’t expect it this soon.

About 10 minutes after my first test drive with IE7 I spent some time staring blankly at the Firefox icon on my desktop. I hated to admit it, but Microsoft had out Firefox’d Firefox.

Read on for why I think that…

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