A Browser that Works Please
Now I consider myself a fairly tech savvy person. I have been coding html (the basic code for websites) since grade school. Back when adding images and some javascript that played endless, horrible sounding midi music files was pretty high tech shit. I haven’t kept myself completely up to date but I generally know my way around code.
The rest of my computer knowledge pretty much follows the same track. I don’t need to ask questions about how to use programs or peripherals and if my computer needs some new memory or a hard drive, I can handle it myself. Part of the reason my relationship with my partner, who is a computer tech, works so well is because he can actually come home to a place where the “How do I get my e-mail?” questions stop.
This can leave me in a bit of a bad place when it comes to programs, I become a little more picky than the average user.
Take for instance Mozilla Firefox. Now I love Firefox, I’ve actually been using it full time since it was named Firebird, but it seems more and more like it’s being phoned in. The biggest issue I had with Firefox 2 was the memory hogging. I like my tabs and I will leave my browser open while I am doing other things. On both my windows and my mac machines it would get to the point that it would freeze and then, more often than not, completely crash. It was completely infuriating, especially since my computers, being the products of my aforementioned techie boyfriend, are both maxed out to 4 GB of RAM.
So I started using Opera full time as I had dabbled before, worked great. Until Wordpress (the lovely software that runs this blog) upgraded to a new version and half the new features didn’t want to play nice with Opera. Great. So Opera won’t work, Firefox is crash-tastic, I think I would cut off my own digits before using Internet Explorer again and I hate the extreme lack of customization for Safari. It felt like I was to become a victim of the unknown internet browser abyss.
But there was hope on a horizon, a new version of Firefox! What a complete letdown. First of all it looked like Safari. Why, I ask, why? Whatever, I can skin it and make it look like a bastard child of Margaret Thatcher and Hello Kitty if I want to. But what about that improved performance? Severely lacking, the change in speed is just not detectable and it is still a disgusting memory hog, but hey it has parental controls. Ack! How about we let the parents who want a computer for a babysitter deal with those and give the rest of us some meaningful updates.
So here I sit, waiting, for a browser that neither insults my intelligence nor my computer’s resources. Something that acknowledges the fact that I know what I’m doing and know when their program is doing a poor job.
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