Today I have experienced an email phenomenon that has likely affected us all, but had yet to be classified until now.
It starts innocently enough when you email someone a question and they reply only by adding someone else to the CC list. This part doesn't worry you at all because you assume that CC'd person is the expert on the subject and will be able to provide you a better answer. The first sign of trouble is when that expert replies only by adding yet another person -- or even multiple people -- to the CC list. At this point, your chances of actually receiving a reply have dropped off significantly. The supposed expert has either shrugged off your question onto someone else less knowledgeable or wasn't an expert after all and has started the process anew by picking a new "expert".
At this point, you have what I call an email snowball. The email keeps growing bigger and bigger as more people are CC'd, but, since the sense of individual responsibility to reply is inversely proportional to the number of people in the CC list, the mail thread will eventually just melt away and leave no trace of an answer to your question. Beware of the email snowball.
You have confirmed it: Mozilla is quickly gaining ground on Internet Explorer. According to my web server logs, 24.9% of the visitors to this site are using Mozilla (including its variants such as FireFox) and only 24.1% are using Internet Explorer. It's also interesting that over fifty percent of my hits are from RSS readers.
I'm positive these statistics don't hold true for the Internet at large, but if techies are choosing Mozilla over IE then there's a good chance they'll be making the same choice in the future when they setup computers for co-workers, family members, and friends.
My choice of browser isn't a religious decision, so I often find that I have multiple instances of both browsers open. They both have their strengths and weaknesses. Internet Explorer seems a bit more polished and is compatible with more web sites -- plus it has the wonderful Google Toolbar. FireFox has wooed me with tabbed browsing, some handy plugins, and a great HTML source viewer. You might think I forgot to mention pop-up blocking, but nearly everyone has a pop-up blocker of some sort installed and XP SP2 will soon eliminate that problem altogether.
Slashdot carried an article today about the possibility of some new feature work on Internet Explorer. This, of course, set off the usual Microsoft bashing and "FireFox rulez" discussion, but amidst the noise there were actually quite a few posters who understood that competition will make both browsers better. As the original Slashdot poster stated, "Go competition!"