Browser Wars II
Tuesday evening I had an odd thing happen to me. This was of course later in the evening after I had spent an extra four hours at the office hacking into a server that someone had set a power on password, and then installing DNS & DHCP on said server, as well as configuring and testing. So bottom line is I was already leaning in the direction of a foul mood toward technology. I brought up my trusty laptop for my usual evening of checking out social networks, browsing through some blogs, and even really dedicated and doing what I convince myself I should be doing working on my journal, my own blog, just writing on a book, or if not put out with technology, working on a web project. It was obviously not going to the later of those choices on Tuesday. When my laptop came up, I the proceeded with bringing up my trusting Mozilla Firefox browser, which aside from a short period right when they came out with 2.0, has been my preferred choice of browsers for sometime. I do use both it, Internet Explorer, occasionally Safari, and I do have an install of Chrome for testing purposes at home as well. However, Firefox still wins for me except for when they were doing some major pushing up updates right around the time 2.0 came out and they kept breaking things for me. Deja vu is what I should be saying. So as my Firefox launches, it informs me that I have updates, please wait while it installs and then it will launch. I was a little dismayed as I am a pretty sure I have nothing set to automatically update. I am still trying to figure out if I pushed a button to fast or it sometimes I click something on the touch pad (no, I rough it with the laptop, no sticking mouse for me – then again, I try to use a mouse minimally on a desktop either – long story, but I like the keyboard, come from command line background, and moving to the mouse just makes me lose the home row in the dark, where I do my best work). It upgraded and seemingly started fine. It looks like, with the impending release of 3.1, they are busy slipping in some patches and the like, bring my 3.0.2 up to 3.0.3. However, upon the restart I now find that it has lost my configurations for my various plugins. I don’t use a lot of plugins, bu the ones I do use I love. I use mostly GBookmarks, FireFTP, ForecastFox, WebmailNotifier, along with a few different validation tools and used to be FireGPG, though that one got broke with 3.0 and has not been fixed. Well with the new upgrade it screwed with plugins and settings. For instance I was immediately prompted about storing passwords for sites. Come on folks, I work in IT and used to do security, I NEVER store passwords in the system for webpages (short of those in the plugins). Further, all but FireFTP lost configurations and at this point, after even uninstall and reinstall, WebmailNotifier is still not checking for Gmail correctly, despite being configured and not receiving any error messages. Anyway, that is a long way to get to the topic. I am sure a few of you remember the browser wars of the last 90′s, where the innovation was such that the web had something new to offer just about every day between what IE and Netscape was offering and coming up with to out do one another. Add into the mix some of the then smaller players that were pushing things and all the add-ons (that were not even organized plugins in the day) and it really pushed the web to be what it is today. Guess what, with Chrome joining the game recently, there is a real push to move browsers again with more innovation. The folks that have market share do not want to lose it, and Chrome has some innovations and ideas – though probably lacks some in stability, security, and privacy at this point. It is going to be exciting to see what comes out of it in the next year or so. Of course back in the 90′s, it was done with out much in the way of standards. It also lead to a lot of quick releases that were not tested very thoroughly and often caused things that were working to break. The good news is all the majors are at least giving lip service to staying strictly with the standards, but it is obvious from where I sit that the upgrades are still likely to have a few rough edges now and then. I would suggest you read about and wait and see before adopting the newest browser upgrades just to be sure. Further, at least two of the majors have a bad habit of adding things to standards and then claiming their version is the standard. Anyway, a little pain is going to be well worth the potential outcome down the road.
At the risk of pushing a really dangerous button ... MacBook Pro. Lighted keyboard. But I know the Mozilla upgrade pain. I've lost bookmarks at least once.
OOOOO, I SOOOO wanna say something about the best work in the dark.....but I will resist. There's always this:http://www.enablemart.com/Catalog/Large-Key-Large-Print-Keyboards - braille buttons...or this: http://www.buypcsupplies.com/product/38537/ -backlit keyboard.... But do computer purists like yourself go for such newfangled things? How's Chrome, BTW? Once I get somewhere with proper Internet access, I wanna try it....
You all are way to geeky for me, I am old fashioned. Keyboard in lap, in the dark, tape of the LED's on as that is to much ambient light. And we all know that technologically speaking I am always about 2-3 years behind the curve - just because I live it daily at office.
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