|
Archive: March 9, 2003
|
Well, my Mozilla experiment is at an end. I have been faithfully using Mozilla 1.2 as my everyday browser for two weeks. In the end I like many things about it, but I'm switching back to IE. Here's why:
- My laptop's trackpad scroll feature doesn't work with Mozilla. I am so used to drawing my finder down the right edge of my trackpad to scroll, and it just doesn't work with Mozilla. Which is weird, because the wheel on my desktop mouse works fine.
- The back button doesn't always work. Sometimes you click back, and you say "uh, how did I get here?"
- No Google toolbar. Wow, did I miss that!
- Mozilla opens windows under my taskbar. I have my taskbar at the top of my screen (yeah, weird, I know, but try it and see if you don't like it, too) and Mozilla doesn't handle this right. Crummy.
- IE is faster. It really is. Day in, day out, page in, page out, IE is noticeably faster. Especially when you load, like, ten pages at once. Who would do this? I do, all the time.
- There are sites which don't work right with Mozilla. It is really close, but everyone tests with IE, and not everyone tests with Mozilla. Complicated CSS, non-standard JavaScript, and interfaces to media players can trip it up.
- Mozilla won't use Outlook to send email, it only works with Mozilla's email client. Independent of my opinion of Mozilla email - which is very low, it looks like Netscape from four years ago - I wasn't trying to switch email clients. They should optionally use Windows' default client setting, like Opera does.
The stuff I'll miss most:
- Pop-up window blocking. I forgot how much I hate them. Mozilla kills them all.
- Ad blocking. I forgot how much I hate them. Mozilla doesn't kill them all, but it does a nice job.
- Mozilla can save images as JPGs, IE can't. I still launch Mozilla when there's a picture I want to save.
|
|
Want to read a real crock? Check out Why We Need a High-tech Shakeout. This article deserves a thorough fisking, but it is too vague to rebut logically. It is [as Bohr said of Heisenberg's quantum theory] "not even wrong". Read this as a perfect example of why blogs are gaining popularity and are more reliable than "the media". (Have you ever noticed than whenever you read a media story about something you really know, they get it wrong?)
This article is also a great example of a sheep in wolf's clothing. It was written by a retired McKinsey director named T. Michael Nevens, and was published without attribution under the McKinsey Quarterly name. Then CNet picked it up. So we have the aura of CNet and the respectability of McKinsey, but under the covers it is still just one person's opinion. Which doesn't make it wrong. It just means you can't buy it without thinking about it...
The biggest problem is evident in the headline. What the heck is "high-tech"? It could be anything from computer equipment to IT services to Internet commerce to software to biotechnology to, well, you name it. Any conclusion you reach about a subject so broad can only be vaguely useful. Here's a sample observation: "Customer spending will probably pick up when enterprises become convinced that they can get top- and bottom-line benefits from their technology investments". Wow, brilliant! After some serious buzzword dropping and piffle, the author opines "most likely the industry will require outside intervention". Huh? Which industry? What would be "outside"? What would "intervention" look like - acquisitions, capital investments, consulting, government regulation? No answers follow, just more words. Sigh.
|
|
I've been Winerized! Dave posted a link to The Tyranny of Email on Scripting News this afternoon, and 471 new users have come by since. Uh, make that 472. What's really cool is seeing so many different sites in my referer logs. Thanks for the links!
|
Return to the archive.
|
|
