Poor, poor Microsoft. It can even get a fair deal from the supposedly ‘impartial’ guides of the information superhighway: the search engines. Sometime back, there was a big to-do about how Google returned Microsoft at the top of any query for “more evil than Satan himself”. This story is pretty well documented at these two places. Since then, many webpages have been created on the subject and Google has faithfully indexed them as well. Thankfully, links to these pages are now returned instead a reference to the hallowed www.microsoft.com site. But have the problems truly gone away? Can Microsoft ever escape the tag of the Evil Software Company?

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Are skins bad for you? They are distracting, and I wouldn’t want them in my editor, but they look good on “Entertainment”-ware like WinAmp, nevertheless. But your browser? Mozilla, I have said below, rocks — but only in terms of its HTML/XML rendering. In terms of looks, it is ugly. You can spice it up with skins — in fact, with XUL support, you can drastically alter its appearance — but this begs the question: shouldn’t the default have been a little more aesthetic and fuctional? The worst bit is that Netscape 6 might just end up perpetuating the myth that free software is ‘clunky’, not ‘polished’ and ‘professional’. Before you jump to conclusions, try out — or take a look at — KDE. There, even the default looks great!

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