This Wired article discusses the upcoming switch of AOL to Mozilla from IE in its upcoming 8.0 AOL software release. Apparently, AOL has already tested Mozilla as the default browser with it's Compuserve division. Author Paul Boutin points out that "with 34 million subscribers worldwide and 20 percent of the U.S. ISP market, America Online would single-handedly roll back a big chunk of Microsoft's 90-plus percent market share among browsers by switching to Mozilla."

It troubles me that in questioning why AOL would make this move, the article begins by asking "Why bother?" And while it's clear that the purpose of the article is to understand what the business advantages would be for AOL in switching, the tone of that question, as well as the rest of the article, seems to make a case for complacency -- for having AOL and Mozilla step aside to allow IE's continued dominance of the browser market -- all in the name of web standards. It also erroneously implies that the geek community is happy with in an IE world.