(Title stolen from Holger Levsen)

Whenever I see this image [mozilla open Standards], I want to make a spoof of it titled:

Every time you make an Ajax app, god kills a firefox.

But I would certainly be violating Mozilla trademarks by doing so (their artwork, logos and trademarks such as "firefox" are not OpenSource).

Anyway: AJAX is a hackaround, in particular it is not an open standard. Please use it only where it's really needed. Granted, there is worse (e.g. Flash; prepare for incompability hell now that the first opensource plugin can playback youtube videos - as you might be aware, many Linux distributions can not ship Adobe Flash, so they'll likely start shipping this plugin as soon as it's somewhat working sufficiently; or ActiveX which only works with MSIE...), but that's not really a good excuse for this abuse of Javascript that is called AJAX.

On a side note, since I already mentioned flash - I can really recommend the Flashblock mozilla extension. A must have: you can view any flash if you need to by just clicking on it, but they won't be loaded automatically anymore. So you can easily access youtube (just one extra click!), but won't be bothered by flash ads and such stuff.

Oh, and Adobe. They're probably the biggest blocker for a widespread Linux adoption judging by this article [computerworld.com], which is already very positive on Linux ("Unlike many of the applications included on new Windows systems, these don't seem to come with annoying self-launching advertisements, such as the irony-challenged Trend Micro Anti-Spyware pop-up upgrade pleas that plagued my HP system at home."): maybe his biggest issue is that he couldn't just run his Adobe Photoshop Elements on Linux.

Of course there are application trying to offer the same functionality; starting with Gimp, digiKam and Krita (and I'm not sure he tried Krita and digiKam as well; they are probably more similar to Adobes product), but I can understand his wish to be able to continue using the same applications.

(My personal recommendation: start using Opensource applications on Windows, e.g. Firefox, Thunderbird, Inkscape (great vector graphics program!) (and it's using open standards: SVG), Gaim (multi-protocol instant messenger and tons of others. They're free, so even if you don't use them every day, you didn't waste money on them... and if you happen to like them: you can be sure that they'll be working the same if you do the switch to Linux at some point in the future. Be prepared for when Microsoft says you PC is too old.