Instead of working to ensure that my parents' computer running Windows 3.1 shipped with a C compiler by default a few decades ago, people inside Microsoft and Borland were probably thinking the same thing.

This line of thinking is basically the reason I had to wait a few more years until I could buy my own computer that could run Linux as a teenager.

For lots of people, the world is a very different place now, but just because something's trivial for people like us doesn't necessarily mean everyone else can very easily 'just download something else'.

Defaults can be tremendously powerful, especially when they enable others to build free software.

> > What's the problem? The users can just download the same browser if they're really interested in the additional functionality.

> Instead of working to ensure that my parents' computer running Windows 3.1 shipped with a C compiler by default a few decades ago, people inside Microsoft and Borland were probably thinking the same thing.

Er, no, they weren't. For Microsoft, they were not thinking users could just download top quality dev tools, in fact that would have been directly contrary to their interests -- they had a profit-based motive for assuring that quality dev tools were a separate purchase. Bundling them into the OS would have required them to sacrifice the additional cost that people making money developing software would be willing to pay for a dev tools .

And Borland was also trying to sell dev tools, but was really irrelevant to what Windows was going to be bundled with.

I agree that defaults are powerful, which is why a potential developer who can't figure out how to download a browser and has nobody around to help will either be using IE or Safari anyway. Anyone who can get a copy of Firefox installed can get another browser installed a LOT more easily than he could figure out how to USE any of the dev features.

The number of potential developers who COULD get Firefox downloaded but COULDN'T figure out how to get a second browser downloaded, yet who COULD figure out how to use the dev features if only they were in Firefox is a tiny fraction of the non-developers who would be confused and annoyed by having dev features they don't want cluttering their interfaces by default.

You are comparing "Go to the store and buy a box of 10 floppy disks to bring home and install" to "click a button on a website"

that's my point: it's clearly not mozilla's fault if everyone doesn't have internet access today or devices that aren't shared with/scrutinized/controlled by others, just like it wasn't redhat or mandrake's fault that the install CDs in computer shopper magazine didn't ship with drivers for my parents' computers a few decades back.

but then, as now, getting started ended up being more complicated for some number of people than it probably seemed to our predecessors at microsoft and borland--including reasons that had little to do with software--but that still could've been influenced by how software development tools were distributed.

maybe it was just me, but getting started is probably still more complicated for some people in the world than either of us can imagine. maybe that's no big deal, but my experience makes me pretty sensitive to access to free software development tools.

sure--it's far from sufficient, but for some number of people, it's necessary. at least it was for me.