Firefox Up, IE Down

Good ink on Firefox 1.0 in the New York Times today. I don't mean the ad, either, but the story The Fox Is in Microsoft's Henhouse (and Salivating). The hapless (and of course soulless) Microsoft mouthpiece actually says the following in "defense" of IE over Firefox (snarky comments in italics from the original story):

• current users of Internet Explorer will stick with it once they take into account "all the factors that led them to choose IE in the first place." Beg your pardon. Choose? Doesn't IE come bundled with Windows?
  
  
• Firefox... has thus far enjoyed "a bit of a free ride." If I were the spokesman for the software company that included the company's browser free on every Windows PC, I'd be more careful about using the phrase "free ride."
  
  
• Even though he's the " director of product management for Windows", he doesn't even use IE himself! Instead he uses Maxthon, published by a little company of the same name. It uses the Internet Explorer engine but provides loads of features that Internet Explorer does not. "Tabs are what hooked me," he told me.
  
  
• one suggestion for those who cannot use the latest patches in [XP] Service Pack 2: buy a new PC... "It's like buying a car," he said. "If you want to get the latest safety features, you have to buy the latest model." In this case, the very latest model is not a 2001 Internet Explorer, but a 2004 Firefox.

Basically, Firefox's remaining market is every person on earth who hasn't heard of it yet. IE is toast.