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2001-05-22 | 11:33 p.m.

There are a lot of diaries I can't read. The great and powerful Andrew says it's because the diarists have modified the table settings in such a way that Netscape turns up its nose. Well, that's not exactly the way he put it. But you get the idea. He said I could try viewing the diaries in IE if I really wanted to read them.

I've noticed one or two diarists who either insult Netscape users or attempt to coerce us into using IE. It reminds me of a now-defunct online shopping site called Boo.com. This site hyped itself as the hippest place you could possibly be online, but you couldn't get past the splash page without running the most recent edition of IE (which was probably the icky early incarnation of IE4). I remember reviewing the site (that was my job at the time) and saying flat out that I wasn't going to install a new browser (I did have IE at the time but not the latest version) just to look at a shopping site, and I doubted that anyone else would, either.

Of course, that kind of arrogance helped make Boo.com one of the most notorious failures of the Internet age. You can read about it in Boo! and the 100 Other Dumbest Moments in e-Business History. I don't mean to suggest that the diarists I can't read belong to that category. I suspect they don't even know that anyone is having trouble reading them. After all, I don't check out my diary in IE, why would they look at theirs in Netscape?

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