Bitch please:

Innovation in browsers is continuing fast and furious. Just today “private browsing” was added to an official Firefox build and that’s sure to be appealing to mainstream users and early adopters.

Firefox Reaches 20% Market Share for First Time Ever (ReadWriteWeb)

Good on Firefox for making such a popular browser among the Windows and Linux crowds, but please — private browsing has been in Apple’s Safari browser since version 2.0 (which was released in April, 2005).

I agree that innovation in browsers is rolling along at a pretty healthy pace these days, but it’s certainly not coming from Firefox. Tabbed browsing was an innovation from Opera, Apple is now the leader when it comes to state of the art open source rendering engines, and now Google has entered the fray by improving browser stability and performance.

Firefox is being left behind, copying features from it’s bigger, commercially-oriented cousins.

It’s the same story with most consumer oriented open source projects. OpenOffice.org is a cheap rip-off of Microsoft Office, The GIMP is a Photoshop wannabe, Thunderbird strives to be just like every other mail client, and the Linux desktop crowd seem to be hell bent on plagiarising Windows (while at the same time evangelising how much better it is).

None of these flagship projects are innovative. They’re poor imitations. But somehow they still manage to give certain sectors of the tech press a stiffy every time they add a new feature.

Please, stop bullshitting us.