Scott Berkun goes Firefox

Adding one new user may not do a whole lot for Firefox's market share, but when that user is Scott Berkun, the Mozilla team may well feel justified in doing a victory dance. Berkun, it turns out, was one of the main project managers behind Internet Explorer at Microsoft. In fact, over the course of nearly a decade at Microsoft, Berkun worked on virtually all of the pre-XP versions of IE, starting all the way back with IE 1.0. Yet, as Berkun says in his blog, he reached a point where IE just didn't do it for him anymore: "It’s a sad day and a good day. For years I’ve held onto my IE install out of love. I worked on IE 1.0 through 5.0, and was one of the people that designed much of its UI. But my love for the past has faded. Last week I switched to Firefox: and I’ve been happy." Berkun has blogged his switch in great detail, and his post should be required reading at Redmond. After all, IE7 is just an early beta, and there's still plenty of time to take some of Scott's ideas to heart before the final version ships. (Oh, and he doesn't give Firefox a free ride, either, so the team over there should check out his problems with the UI before starting work on 2.0.)