"Our Favorite IE8 Add-Ons" - Microsoft Bias Showing?

I’ll be the first to admit that Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 is a big improvement on its predecessors. Although my reasons would be different than most, I am sure that lots of people will eventually have cause to celebrate.

On the other hand, I find it disturbing that this PC Magazine article, has appeared, with the program not yet out of the pre-release stage. Internet Explorer does not hold the highly exalted position it once did, and certainly among the readership of that magazine the percentage of users is much lower than almost ever before.

Talking about the favorite things of a browser that, among their readership is in the minority, in this early stage, with such glowing terms, shows a bias that I have long felt from that magazine, and to a lesser extent ZDNet in general. I remember how very long it took to get an article extolling the benefits of Firefox, along with popular add-ons, and there simply has not been any article of this nature for Opera. Yet another ‘favorite’, though very new and with very small rates of adoption, Chrome, has already received how-to articles, no doubt because of the monetization probabilities of its Google heritage.

While it might be said that amongst the minority browsers, Internet Explorer is the majority, I am not sure I could, if forced, point to a similar article from the magazine concerning any other software in a similar position. (If truly forced, I might point out to articles in the very early ’90s, speaking about ways to enhance your OS/2 installation. Great amounts of reader mail were devoted to the waste of space that was, since ‘nobody’ used OS/2.)

I’m certain that Internet Explorer 8 will be popular, as it will be standard with Windows 7, which appears to be on the way to wide adoption, yet only for that reason will it ever enjoy more than miniscule adoption rates. (The reasons for that adoption are another testament to forces pushing into the forefront a product which has nothing to do with quality, or fitness for purpose.)

Isn’t all this attention, so early, just a small bit telling?

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One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.Elbert Hubbard