Browsing

I have never liked the term "surfing", as an Australian it doesn't exactly have many connotations with the electronic world, besides which it reeks of lameness. Instead I browse, although I have to admit I am not really what you would call a power browser, still I do spend some time each day looking up various things. I am inspired to write this because of two pet hates, browsers and badly designed webpages.

As a long time user of Linux I have been frustrated over the years by the lack of support for non IE browsers and while it is getting better (MS have done such a bad job with IE that people are actually leaving it in droves) there is still nothing more frustrating then going to a webpage and being told that "your browser is not able to view this site, please upgrade to IE 5+ and try again". Firstly I have no idea what they think IE 5+ can do that firefox can't but chances are they just do the check and reject you based on your user agent (the string that your browser sends to the server to identify itself and its capabilities). In reality you can probably view the site just fine, but because of some silly web designer who thought it was "kewl" to include a check and ban you, you can't view a thing. The other more frustrating thing is when you hit a web page and it is so heavily customised for IE that it really doesn't render at all in anything else. I know I am not alone in this, in fact over the years I have seen many amusing posts about this kind of thing, but it still never fails to frustrate you when you are on the receiving end. Personally I browse for information, and I want that information presented to me in an accessible, available manner, I don't want to have to dig through reems of shit, install 4 plugins and then spend 5 minutes digging through the site to find that information.

Browsers are another surprising thing for me. People continue to use IE. Think about that. This is a product that is so bad that even MS are completely rewriting it and have stopped releasing it as a stand alone product (although that was also due to their antitrust case) It has more security holes then any other browser in existance and probably more then most OSs. Now compare that with a product like Firefox. Firefox is a complete rewrite of Mozilla and has huge improvements over its predecessor. Aside from how good the rendering function is its the features that really set firefox apart, and even though many other browsers are now catching up to them (things like tabbed browsing etc are all firefox innovations AFAIK) there is one thing that still really sets firefox apart, plugins. Plugins allow you to turn your mild mannered browser into a superman of browsing kind. There are so many plugins out there that you can do almost anything you can imagine with them, from turning firefox into a rss reader, to doing dictionary checks with a click, to mouse gestures, to traffic shaping downloads there is a lot there. Click on the firefox link in my "Things I use" section and go see what I mean.