Pick a Standard! Any Standard!

My OS of choice is Apple Macintosh. Macintosh usually gets the shit end of the stick when it comes to developing applications, but seriously… I find it a tad ridiculous that after over a decade in the era of the Internet, I am still relegated to having three different browsers open to view the World Wide Web.

Here’s a run down of my favorite browsers and their pros and cons:

Firefox

Ahhh Firefox. The supposed “MSIE Killer“….

Pros:
• It’s generally an overall superb browser and does pretty much everything it purports.
• It appears to be faster than Safari.(Sorry, you aren’t getting me to waste time on benchmarks.)
• I can edit phpwcms WYSIWYG mode.
• I can edit this blog in it (b2evolution) with no fear of the BB code dropping the tags at the bottom of my entry, although it does have a wacky bug that slams you back up to the top of the entry every time you put in a [em] or [strong] tag in, so doing several in a paragraph is particularly hellish.

Cons:
• Reading the giant ubiquitous Flash smilie ads that have become the New Porn spam scheme of the millenium. Name a reference site and you’ll see them, any lyrics site, dictionary.com, imdb.com, even bartleby.com, who should know better. I’m not against internet advertising, but my god, is it necessary to slap two or three of this idiot banners on one page?

Firefox just sits there frozen when hitting a site with these internet billboards of obscenity. I’ve read this happens in both Windows and Mac in several forums. After a Macromedia representative posted to this blog a while back, I thought it may be them or the browser – it definately happens in both Firefox and Mozilla, so… The only other reason I can think of for this annoyance is that these similie hucksters have apparently hired people who don’t know that 30fps is not necessary in the export of Flash for online usage.

Only two options here. Boycott these sites until Smiley Central is dead and buried or use Firefox with an Ad Blocker installed.

Omniweb

Pros:

• As an alternative to Firefox, I downloaded the demo for Omniweb. (Yes, you have to pay for it, eventually.) It’s a really great browser with tons of solid usable features.
• Prettier than all the other browsers.

Visit the site to see why this browser is so great.

Cons:
• Forget about using any php goodies such as phpwcms or b2evolution. It’s response is almost as slow as Safari and when you try and edit online in forums or blogs using “BB” code, it doesn’t put the tags around the word, unlike Firefox, it puts them at the bottom of the article. (Considering it’s code is based upon Safari, this would make sense.)

• It doesn’t allow the editing of WYSIWYG in phpwcms.
• It seems slower than Firefox but faster than Safari.
• It crashes consistently when opening the OS “save as” dialogue box.

I guess what I’m trying to say in my fractured and poorly researched rant is that I cannot stand the fact that the internet (if we’re sticking to the information super highway metaphor) is chock full of lemons. But if I may point my waggy little finger at someone it would be the (most likely) 30 fps banners that have plagued me recently. Do I really have to buy a G5 just to surf the web?

Besides, it’s my blog and I’ll cry if I want to.

Anyway, it looks like I have to browse in one browser, edit php in another, watch Flash in a third. I can’t be bothered to try any more browsers. I’ve given up on MSIE and I already have Mozilla, the defunct Camino, Firefox, Netscape, Omniweb, Opera. Is Windows any better? Does anyone care? Should I get off this damned zombie box and go back to pencil and paper? Who knows. I do know that the computers will, once again, be the death of us all.