A friend turned me onto a different web browser, Chimera, which is powered by the Gecko rendering engine. I’m posting this from it right now and hope there’s no strange compatibility issue with it and Radio. It’s still in beta form (0.4) and seems to lack a couple of basic features, but this thing is damn nice and I see how it could be THE default browser for the Mac if MS decides to drop all support for Apple in the future.

That seems like a very real option considering some of the things going on right now like Apple partnering with Sun Microsystems to bring office applications to the Mac. At first, I thought it could be the worst thing to happen to Apple, but after thinking about it and talking with a friend, I’m starting to see how positive of a move this is for Apple and how MS should be the worried ones (and they probably are). I’m probably about to mention something he told me word for word, so I hope he’ll forgive me if I do. Everyone has been so programmed to think that you NEED MS for some reason or another and if you don’t use them, you don’t survive. You need Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Internet Explorer, and Outlook (Entourage). No. You need a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, web browser, and e-mail application. OpenOffice could fill the office apps easily. Chimera could be the browser replacement. Apple’s Mail app sucks, but there’s potential and there’s plenty of other e-mail clients out there.

Imagine it though. A platform void of anything Microsoft and running just as well or better than any Wintel computer. I think a lot of people would welcome that idea. Most people don’t use MS products because they like them anyway. Hell, most consumers already see MS as America’s “evil empire”. People use MS products because they know of no other. You don’t NEED MS for anything (as far as end-users go). I think Apple knows this and (if they do what I think they may do in the future) they have a lot of balls to be the ones to aggressively go out there and prove it. It’s all very exciting!