Situation: The Mozilla dev team is adding a thing called Places into the 3.0 branch.

Response: People are all like, “oy vey how will this help me?”.

My commentary: People don’t know what they want before they get it. They instinctively want what they had before, unless they’re forced to accept an alternative. Like tabbed browsing, for instance.

• The interface looks much cleaner, much neater. The new default icon set is at once less busy and more attractive, giving the application a much-needed facelift.
• Almost everything is in the same place as before. That’s good. Some functionality has been renamed. That’s alright.
• Tabs are good, but they’re essentially the same as the Labels they replace, a major exception being the ability to apply more than one Tag. Which is troublesome, actually, because they’re still numbered by what I can only assume is priority and have the ability to turn the subject line of your email different colours (a helpful visual clue for important messages, or simply marking which messages have been dealt with). But if you add more than one tag, the colour system obviously doesn’t follow. It remains the colour of the highest priority tag. I find this somewhat clumsy.
• Still on tabs here. If you add the “Tag” column to your second pane (as I’ve done), you can see what tags have been applied to your message. This is good, this is nice, but adding a tag to a message is still a three-click process, which is tedious, unless you remember what numbers are applied to which tags. Which is also clumsy. Tagging emails is a great feature, but let me show the Thunderbird developers what would make it an amazing feature: Allow me to click on the Tag Column portion of the second pane and have it turn into a text field (with a selectable tag list or tag cloud underneath) into which I can type and have Thunderbird autocomplete for me.
• Still on tags. Please, divide them up with something. Like a comma. Or a pipe. Or a slash. I don’t care. At least then they don’t look like a badly-formed sentence.
• The new mail notification is so much better than the old one, which was hopelessly broken beyond belief. It would report mail that was being marked as spam, mail that was routed directly to junk, mail that didn’t exist, and wouldn’t disappear from the system tray when the message it was reporting was clicked on (instead choosing to wait until I exited the folder). The new one seems to have solved these problems, is better to look at, and contains more information than simply “MAIL IS HERE HURR”.
• Folder summary popups are a nice feature. Don’t know if I’ll ever use it… except maybe when someone’s looking over my shoulder and I’ve got a barn-burner of an email coming in from my political dissident friends.
• Installation was fast, too. Surprisingly so.
• One last thing. Thunderbird needs a distributed installation system for Windows. I really don’t want to walk around to 20 desktops and make sure each one is dandy.

Computer: AMD Dual Core 3.0GHZ something or other. 2 GB Ram. 7200RPM HD. Windows XP SP2, fully patched. AVG Antivirus. Windows Defender. Pretty clean install, only been running for about six months with very light usage.

Install Time

FF2: 40 seconds.
IE7: 11 minutes.

Successful?

FF2: Yes. Within minutes I had started it up and installed a new theme and a couple extensions.
IE7: No. IE7 told me that the install was “not successful”, but gave me no reasons. It suggested I restart my computer. Again.

Ease of Install

FF2: Opened the binary package. Selected the default options and agreed to the license. It installed with no errors.
IE7: Opened the binary package. Agreed to the license. Took 30 seconds to “validate my computer”. Asked me if I wanted to install a “malicious software removal tool” and the “latest updates”. Took five minutes to download and run those thing. Six minutes after that, the install exited and told me it wasn’t successful.

What I did after installing

FF2: Went to the Mozilla Add-on site, installed a few extensions and a new theme, and wrote this blog post.
IE7: Opened Firefox 2 to look at Microsoft’s suggestions on why the install hadn’t worked, which amounted to, “The gnomes did it. Beware gnomes.” I can’t find any cogent reason why the install failed. I can’t find any way to work around it. I can’t be arsed to continue on with this.

What I would have found if the install had gone right

FF2: Looks the same with a few tweaks under the hood, such as in-line spelling. Seems slightly faster than the last FF release.
IE7: Clone of FF1, except with a confusing new interface (why couldn’t they at least use the “ribbon” concept of Office?), and lots of buttons conveniently hidden around the screen, all of which do various different things, some of which even I don’t understand. No internal spell-checker. No internal add-on mechanism (that I can see). Options are labyrinthine. Oddly, it takes about as much time to open IE7 as it does to open FF2.

Why did I upgrade?

FF2: Because I like Firefox and I heard about the inline spellchecker, which basically sold me on it. Now, if someone would write an extension that could sync dictionaries between computers using nothing but my Gmail account, I’d pay them $100.
IE7: Because Internet Explorer 6 has been the bane of my IT existence for the last three, maybe four years. Nothing could possibly be worse than IE6, so when I heard IE7 had a “data broker” and sandboxed security and whatnot, it wasn’t a matter of whether to install it, but a matter of how quickly could I get it done and hopefully save myself a lot of headaches.

Why did I write this?

Because I am a satisfied Firefox user. Though I suppose if IE7 had actually installed properly, I might have been a satisfied IE7-on-the-side user. I guess we’ll never know.

For those of you disinclined to propeller hats, let your eyes glaze over and for the love of Vishnu, don’t read this post.

• I have so much junk on this computer (at work), it’s not funny. So today before I began working, I started giving it the old clean up, deleting stuff I don’t need. And I found three screensavers, thirteen programs, five drivers, and a bunch of media I didn’t need.
• At work, we use TrueCrypt a lot. I trust you can find the link for yourself. I love the program, actually; especially the fact that they’ve built plausible deniability right into the program in the form of encrypted-volume-within-encrypted-volume. Which is nice when we have financials we don’t want a whole lot of people to see.
• Today I deprecated an entire filing cabinet in the face of scanners and hard drives. An entire filing cabinet! That’s good news, especially when you consider how much physical space can be saved by scanning instead of physical filing. For instance, at work when people pick up parcels, they sign a packing slip which we file in a giant chest of drawers and occasionally empty into boxes. How much easier would it be if we could just run the papers through a scanner, rename them, and be done with it? A lot easier.
• Incredibly, my spambox in my Gmail account has run up above 1k spam now; it’s been hovering at that mark for a few days now, with the occasional dip into the 900s every day. 1k spam. Wow. For spammers interested in making Gmail’s spam filters even better, my email address is scatterfingers@gmail.com and I check it approximately 1k times a day. Speaking of Gmail:
1. Their spam filters have finally decided to catch the Nigerian scam mail I get; absolutely welcome turn of algorithm.
2. If you want to reach me, email me or IM me. Don’t call me.
3. Feature request for Gmail: since you people like search so much, at least let me search by emails with attachments. For instance, it was hard to find a JPEG I wanted the other day. This feature makes sense, because with 2GB+ disk space, you know people are going to be sending around files a lot more than they used to. (Also, yes, I know how to MacGyver this, so don’t give me a workaround.)
• I slept for ten hours last night. I know, not a technologically-related point, but worth mentioning either.
• Why have the innards of a computer not gotten better in the last 20 years? I mean significantly? Why doesn’t the industry form a standards body and agree to follow its recommendations? Why don’t they understand that creating competing standards is zero-sum, but creating competing products is not?
• Internet Explorer 7 takes up too much screenspace with chrome. So does Firefox 2. But at least with FF I can get rid of what I like. Also, IE7 has switched around all the old ways of doing things for no apparent reason. Why must you do that? It was good the way it was, and I was used to it. I don’t like interface changes every few years. My car, for instance, has a steering wheel, three pedals, and a stickshift, much like cars of the 1950s. Because it works.
• Imagine that operating systems were held to the same standards auto makers are. How would the OS arena be different?

My work is done here. Also please notice I fixed the commenting problems; if you have any more issues, do drop me an email, or IM me. Which reminds me, I need to email Vamp and see how he’s doing.

ABC is streaming full-length TV episodes on its website, something they should have been doing years before now, but hey, it’s alright. The quality is much poorer than regular television in much the same way as regular television is much poorer than a high quality HD rip torrent, but it’s something. And it’s on-demand, so it come when I call it.

One small problem: it’s only available in the US. Bummer. But with a little kung-fu magic of my own (open US proxy paired with ProxySwitch in Firefox), I can watch no problem. Oh you silly studios and your silly restrictions that are so easy to get around.

dan (but still… there you have it)

For those of you using Internet Explorer (still?!?)… you should click this link for some information on why that’s a pretty bad idea.

As an effective alternative, you should try Firefox, a great browser alternative. The only browser, in fact, that I’ll use. It’s safe, more secure, and has wonderful features like Tabbed Browsing, Live Bookmarks, and Inline search that will make you feel truly neutered if you are ever forced to use Internet Exploder ever again.

dan (do the right thing, people… the right thing)