 Why is Netscape the better choice for browsing the web than Microsoft Explorer? Microsoft has no interest in making their browser compatible with the universal HTML standards accepted by all other software developers in the world. They seem to think that they have the right to change the way developers author for the web so that Microsoft software is required, instead of the industry-standard software created by Apple and Macromedia which have been used by creative professionals for years. Instead of conforming to the standards so that everyone speaks the same language, they try to force everyone to speak their language. It is a business strategy which has made them billions of dollars, but has made the web browsing experience more complicated and difficult for all parties. The recent lawsuit by Sun Microsystems against Microsoft about the Java issue in Explorer is a perfect example of Microsoft's disrespect for standardized formats. They tried to rewrite Java for use in Explorer so that only their Java-authoring programs would be compatible. This is the very antithesis of what Java was intended for. Java was meant to unite software and computers, not seperate them.
 Why use Quicktime Video in your websites? Quicktime is the most popular and professional digital video solution on the face of the earth. Hundreds of websites use both Microsoft and Real Network's video formats, sacrificing potential audience, image quality, download efficiency, and transportability. Quicktime is able to scale its quality and type of Codec used to go from low-bandwidth streaming video for the web, to full broadcast-quality video formats for television. This is why George Lucas chose Quicktime to transmit the new Star Wars trailer to the tens of millions of fans all over the world - no other video format could transmit that many terrabytes of information at the high quality and range of size options than Quicktime. As a result of the trailer being available in Quicktime format, it was even possible to convert the Quicktime movie into professional video formats like Media 100 and Avid, for recording on videotape.
 The Shockwave Flash multimedia plug-in was designed by Macromedia to provide fast-downloading interactive content through the browser. There are two different flavours: Flash and Shockwave. Flash uses vector graphics for faster downloads and simply-shaded objects. Shockwave offers much more robust interactivity but is limited to bitmapped graphics, slowing the download time. Again, Microsoft tried to rear its ugly head into this arena by introducing ActiveX, its own proprietary multimedia format. To make matters worse, Explorer used to demand that its users have both ActiveX and Shockwave before the Shockwave would play, and authors would have to use ActiveX to deliver Shockwave on to their pages. This means that both developers and the audience would have to introduce the grimy layer of ActiveX into their web browsing experience to even enjoy simple Shockwave. Fortunately for Netscape users, ActiveX was blissfully absent, and their Flash and Shockwave came through unimpeded.
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