Sam Varghese
Saturday, 17 October 2009 13:14
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 4
So, just what are these applications? Let me make it clear that in some cases, the free application, the one which you can get source for if you're so inclined, is often the better one. In such cases, it tends to show in usage.
Take the case of
Firefox. It has gained an amazing number of users simply because it is a better browser. It had tabs much long before the makers of the common alternative, Internet Explorer, even realised that such a thing existed. It is much faster.
And it boasts such a wonderful array of add-ons due to its open source nature that you can dream of having some kind of functionality today and actually have it in place the next day.
Firefox has some terrible attributes too - it is a memory hog, tends to crash at times, and is often susceptible to malware that is spread via websites, same as Internet Explorer. But as I said before, users don't give a rat's about this. They want speed, they want features, and if those two factors suit, then the other downsides don't matter.
People use it on Windows, they use it on the Mac, they use it on Linux. It is not the best browser available. Opera, a proprietary application, is much better and I know of at least one veteran GNU/Linux user - the head of open source company
CyberSource, Con Zymaris - who uses, and swears by, it. Safari, Apple's creation, looks more elegant than Firefox by miles, and is available for Windows too. But its userbase isn't anything close to that of Firefox.
Making open source applications available for Windows has one downside - there is no chance that anyone is going to switch to GNU/Linux to use those applications. Microsoft loves it too - just as long as the open source app does not compete with its cash cow, Office.
When it comes to HTML editors on GNU/Linux, there used to be two decent choices: BlueFish and Quanta Plus. The former is still around but after the arrival of KDE4, there is no Quanta Plus - yet. I hear that one is in the works.
At work, I use a free HTML editor called Arachnophilia - and neither Quanta nor Bluefish can hold a candle to it. Arachnophilia is free for use but there is no source available; the older version, which is no longer supported, is written in C, is light and intelligently crafted. There is
a newer version written in Java which can be run on Linux but it is much slower and lacks many of the killer features which made its
earlier avatar my favourite HTML editor.
I've passed it on to dozens of Windows users and heard nothing but thanks. And, lest one leap to conclusions, it has no GUI for writing mark-up, it has only source input, but it is very powerful and has many wizards to reduce the drudge aspect of working with mark-up.
There's one difference between me and the average user - I'm prepared to give up something in order to benefit in some better way. Running GNU/Linux is advantageous to me in so many ways that I'm prepared to put up with the inferior BlueFish when I need to do some work with HTML at home.
In my case it's Arachnophilia, but in the case of many others the killer HTMl editor may be HomeSite or some other commercial editor that is used by professional web-page creators. That killer application matters to them, to the extent that an inferior platform is fine.
CONTNUED
