I Feel Dirty
I feel like I did back when I was a Boy Scout and spent the weekend out in the woods running around with other unwashed guys and generally stinking up everything we touched. This is the kind of skank that takes a chisel and a brick of lye to remove. I should probably do myself a favor and just bathe in liquid Lysol. Why, you ask? I switched to Internet Explorer 7.
Aye, I have hearkened to the call of the heathen gods who have demanded certain sacrifices for my repentence at being part of the Mozilla movement. I was first confronted with this infernal contract called the EULA where I offered up my CPU's soul with a single click. After taking the leap, they knew that they had me so the heathen gods immediately asked for another 10Mb of RAM to eat, but that was only an appetizer. It then presented me with a crappy interface, where none of the buttons are grouped logically and where I have a one-click link to Rolling Stone magazine, just in case I felt the need to quickly read their website when I haven't done so (or bought one of their magazines) in my entire life.
Firefox gave a good fight, though, asking me repeatedly if I wanted it to be my default browser. Nonplussed, the heathen gods would ask me right back again. The battle waged on and on into the night when finally Firefox, in a disgusted fit of rage, simply announced that it was moving on and would remain as a backup brower "just in case I ever had the time to visit." It sobbed something about "going ahead and letting it die as long as I was having fun" while the Task Manager gleefully unloaded it at the request of the heathen gods who needed the extra RAM for another snack.
Just as people sometimes get married and realize too late that the grass really wasn't greener on the other side of the wedding ring, I felt this wave of regret -- or it could have just been the boudin I had for lunch -- as the heathen gods showed me the next little feature of switching. Bookmarks are handled completely differently in IE7 as in Firefox and there is no way of merging the two into one or easily translating one to the other. So what followed was a two-hour process of rebuilding my bookmarks, but not in IE7. I used Google Toolbar 4.0 for it. Of course, I've just given Google more personally-identifiable information, but after the heathen gods have gotten hold of me how much worse could it get? At least I can access all of my bookmarks from any computer with the toolbar installed on it; and if it's not installed, I can still get them from my Google account. When giving onself to the heathen gods, one more heathen god is of little consequence.
But now I have IE7 installed, running, and updated with the 217 Windows updates that were required to fix known issues with it. McAfee's Internet Firewall is panting now that I've got IE7 installed, Firefox having allowed it to get slightly out of shape; however, it looks good in a jogging suit and I hear that IE7 gets that extra weight off real quick.
So why did I put myself through such pain? Why did I intentionally require myself to scrub down with a Brillo pad and a bottle of Mr. Clean? Did Firefox break? No, it runs well and in less RAM than IE7, although they're never more than about 10Mb apart from the tests I ran. Does IE7 have some cool new feature that I can't live without? No, not really; in fact, the user interface is really whacked to the point where I wonder if they dug up Andy Warhol to design it; if so, I doubt it took longer than 15 minutes. I switched because I use the browser a lot for work and corporate webmail, corporate timesheets, and Webex just aren't Firefox-friendly. Oh they say they are, but with caveats. Microsoft Exchange webmail neuters about half of itself if you're running on a non-ActiveX browser. Timer -- the timesheet webapp -- sometimes loads in Firefox and sometimes doesn't; I guess it depends on if you've sacrificed enough goats or not that morning. And then there's Webex -- even after downloading and installing the Java plugins for joining and running meetings it still does it every single damn time you use the thing. The IE7 version uses an ActiveX control so that doesn't happen.
So the bottom line is that, without a good ActiveX emulator for Firefox, I just can't use it to do what I need to do for work. And I refuse to have two browsers open every day -- I have have 4Gb of RAM but I'm not going to let two different browsers duke it out each day while consuming 50+Mb each. Plus I'll get the whining about "I'm not your default browser!" while links from other apps that I click just get randomly tossed into one or the other. Nope, no thank you.
Firefox, you won me over not with the smaller footprint, but with your style. Unfortunately, Windows has done to you what it did to Linux on the common-man's desktop -- rendered it redundant. I haven't messed with Linux in five years because my job is 100% Windows-based and dual-booting just cured me of the Linux bug. If I can't load the pages I need for work in Firefox then I'm forced to use IE7 and that makes you redundant, Firefox. Now when you have ActiveX support -- which you won't since that's how the hackers get in most of the time -- I'll switch back, and with great glee and likely fewer headaches. Until then, however, I'm trapped by the heathen gods and their EULA.
I think the bathwater is hot enough now, so I'm heading in with my chisel, Mr. Clean, and Brillo pad to try and scrape off the humiliation of yet again joining the lemmings on their journey to the cliff's edge.
