Tuesday, February 3, 2009

The Vista of Web Browsers?

Random techie rant ahoy!

OK, you have an Operating System (I know, I said "Web Browser", but bear with me for a bit). It's crude and simple but does the job in a kinda semi-acceptable manner. Upgrades come over time, new versions are released, and gradually it gets better. Eventually it gets to the stage where pretty much everything is just fine, thank you very much. Still some idiosyncrasies but the version that's current has been around for long enough for everyone to get used to them. No, nothing really wrong with it that the odd restart every now and then can't fix.

And then a new version is released. Lots of shiny new bells and whistles, but damn it it's slooooooooooooooooow, unstable, things that used to work no longer do, and after playing around with it for a day/week/month you get rid of it and go back to your old Operating System.

But there's a shadow hanging over you, because you know that sooner or later your old version will no longer be supported. Then it will no longer be available. Then standards for all the applications that run on it will change and only the new version can be used.

So sooner or later you're going to have to jump, despite the fact that the new Operating System is still slooooooooooooooooow and unstable and all the rest. Everyone knows it, but the developers have their heads in the sand, they're doing absolutely nothing about it. There's even a crank minority out there that thinks it's somehow better this way.


Now, for a little experiment.

Replace the words "Operating System" above with "Web Browser".

Yes, Firefox 3, I'm talking about YOU.

1 comments:

Entar said...

Huh, really? Firefox 3 works fine for me in general. I use Chrome a lot since it's so fast a lot of the time, but sometimes Chrome gets slow, or doesn't work with some things, so I switch over to FF3.