Mr. Kottke posted a link to this very cool web based email service (oddpost.com) the other day. It has got me pondering an issue that has always botherd me, and has even more so as time passes.

In their (oddpost) faq there is a question regarding browser compatibility other than IE 5+.

But what about Netscape? And Opera? And IE 4.0? And the Mac!?

None of those platforms have a big enough share of the browser market to justify the engineering costs of bringing Oddpost to them. If that situation changes, so will our development plans. In the meantime, we’re focused on making a great product for the majority of machines surfing the Web.

This statement disturbes me a lot. It disturbes me because I myself have made this same decision for the same reasons. However, I know that it is violating a very simple idea that makes the web great: cross platform access to information over a common network (tcp/ip). Now, I really like IE. I use it daily as my browser of choice, but it concerns me that, as time goes on, more and more developers are developing strictly for this browser (and more importantly, the MS platform, because I believe that is really what this implies), and ignoring everything else.

I am not trying to get into a Microsoft is the Devil kind of discussion here. I imagine we could talk in length about the mistakes made by Netscape et al, or about Microsoft's preditory pratices in business. In the end, I find it troubling that one singular platform is dominating the client end of the web.