Gates on Firefox

From Asa at mozillaZine, via Slashdot, comes a meandering interview with Bill Gates at ABC News. Said Billy:

The browser space that we are in we have about 90 percent. Sure Firefox has come along and the press love the idea of that. Our commitment is to keep our browser that competes with Firefox to be the best browser — best in security, best in features. In fact, we just announced that we'll have a new version of the browser so we're innovating very rapidly there and it's our commitment to have the best.

Cute. Clearly the directive to announce an IE7 beta the day that Firefox 1.0 hit 25 million downloads did indeed come from high in the Microsoft food chain. Peter Jennings asked, somewhat indirectly, whether IE7 was being rushed because of what The Mozilla Foundation is doing to IE6's market share, but Gates, as usual, ducked the question.

I may have found the reason for the somewhat unsettling performance increase I got switching from Win98SE to XP Pro. According to the AMD Duron product brief, they were invlolved in the development of XP, and made sure it was optimized for Duron (and Athlon) architecture. On the other hand, I also found the marketing schlock for the AMD K6-III 3D, and it says pretty much the same thing. I know from using that processor in an old Compaq that it's breathtakingly underwhelming, even at 500MHz. In certain situations, my old Pentium 133 could out-perform it. The Duron, on the other hand, has been fast and flawless.