> Just a thought. Nothing really useful.
>
> jul"You know, I reckon one could make money on a bug-free browser"ian

I think that it is a good thought, but I don't think that it will quite work the same way. Extending your comparison, when the Japanese cars started to hit the North American market, you didn't need to get new roads for them to drive on, or new gas to put in them--the old and the new were completely compatible immediately and automatically. If you were the only person in the country driving a Japanese automobile, people might look at you kind of funny, but everything would work just peachy.

With computers, you get a whole new problem. With browsers, it may well be possible, as you say, because in theory, a browser just needs to be able to read and interpret HTML.* However, there are a wide variety of browsers available, some better than others, and as Sam said, none of them worked for the case in point. As has been previously mentioned, a lot of the problem is linking the broswer to the OS, and that's where it gets even worse.

Introducing a new OS to the market is nothing like introducing a new car. If only one person likes your OS, they will not be able to function normally with it. Getting a new OS established enough for people to make software for it would be no easy feat in our largely networked world. This, I think, is why nobody has come along and done a "Japanese car industry", as you put it--the two fields are simply too different for similar principles to be applied effectively.

Don "I wish it were that easy, though..." Monkey

* I realize that browsers do a lot more than this. I just don't want to go into that detail, as it is irrelevant to my post (I think) and I don't want to display my ignorance by showing my "exhaustive" list of known browser functions to be one or two items long. :-)