Reply to Message
Come on Jack, you're smarter than this
You're pushing Chrome as if they're paying you. What's up with that? I'll just take each of your points in order...
1: While it is blatently obvious that not all browsers are created equal, saying that Chrome is "by far the best" is a very opinionated statement. Weary of IE, I tried Chrome when they first came out, and suddenly found myself liking IE a lot more. Chrome reorganized my favorites the way Google thought was best, with little regard for how I wanted it, and then left me no way to manage them outside of dragging each one individually from where Chrome put it, to where I had it before. When you have several hundred favorites nested several layers deep, that is a totally unacceptable alternative. They haven't given me any real incentive to switch back again. And your remark about being able to enter search strings directly into the URL bar ignores IE9, which now allows you to do the same thing.
2: I won't argue that Flash can be a real pig, but for my own experience, it winds up being more of a nuisance to have to enable it when I encounter a site that needs it. If it were just about the ads, I would be happy to leave it disabled, because I have absolutely no use for ads.
3: The RAMdisk idea actually sounds like something I will look into and try out.
4: No argument here either. I ALWAYS uncheck that irritating little checkbox when I install new software - you know the one that says "yes please install the free [Google/Ask/Yahoo/etc.] toolbar" and the one right below it that says "yes please make that my homepage". The only toolbar (if you want to call it that) that I use is my favorites bar. And personally, my homepage is a blank page. I rarely want to look at the same page every time I open my browser, so why waste time loading one when I'm just going to switch to something else anyway?
And finally,
5: Tabs are a great idea, as they do improve organization. But as for your analogy, it's a little ridiculous. I don't know anyone who would minimize one window, then maximize the next, then minimize that one, and maximize the next, etc. It's so much faster to just Alt-Tab from one window to the next. Of course, with Windows 7's thumbnail preview feature on the taskbar, you can even more easily browse not only your tabs in one browser window, but all your open browser tabs/windows without even having to switch tabs. Then I see you're pushing Chrome again. They "treat each tab as an individual process..." Great. But even in IE8, if a tab crashed, it would quite often restart itself without affecting the other tabs. I never actually tried to kill an individual IE8 tab using Process Explorer, but it is possible to do so in IE9. IE9 also allows you to drag an individual tab out of the window to create a separate window, or into another window to make it an additional tab in that window, so Chrome no longer has that advantage over IE either.
I'm not foolish enough to say that IE9 is "by far the best," but it is what I use. Every browser has its own set of pros and cons, and depending on your browsing habits and needs, the balance of pros vs. cons will be different for each person. For my needs, the pros vs. cons balance has never been good enough in any other browser to outweigh the irritation of migrating from one to the other.
1: While it is blatently obvious that not all browsers are created equal, saying that Chrome is "by far the best" is a very opinionated statement. Weary of IE, I tried Chrome when they first came out, and suddenly found myself liking IE a lot more. Chrome reorganized my favorites the way Google thought was best, with little regard for how I wanted it, and then left me no way to manage them outside of dragging each one individually from where Chrome put it, to where I had it before. When you have several hundred favorites nested several layers deep, that is a totally unacceptable alternative. They haven't given me any real incentive to switch back again. And your remark about being able to enter search strings directly into the URL bar ignores IE9, which now allows you to do the same thing.
2: I won't argue that Flash can be a real pig, but for my own experience, it winds up being more of a nuisance to have to enable it when I encounter a site that needs it. If it were just about the ads, I would be happy to leave it disabled, because I have absolutely no use for ads.
3: The RAMdisk idea actually sounds like something I will look into and try out.
4: No argument here either. I ALWAYS uncheck that irritating little checkbox when I install new software - you know the one that says "yes please install the free [Google/Ask/Yahoo/etc.] toolbar" and the one right below it that says "yes please make that my homepage". The only toolbar (if you want to call it that) that I use is my favorites bar. And personally, my homepage is a blank page. I rarely want to look at the same page every time I open my browser, so why waste time loading one when I'm just going to switch to something else anyway?
And finally,
5: Tabs are a great idea, as they do improve organization. But as for your analogy, it's a little ridiculous. I don't know anyone who would minimize one window, then maximize the next, then minimize that one, and maximize the next, etc. It's so much faster to just Alt-Tab from one window to the next. Of course, with Windows 7's thumbnail preview feature on the taskbar, you can even more easily browse not only your tabs in one browser window, but all your open browser tabs/windows without even having to switch tabs. Then I see you're pushing Chrome again. They "treat each tab as an individual process..." Great. But even in IE8, if a tab crashed, it would quite often restart itself without affecting the other tabs. I never actually tried to kill an individual IE8 tab using Process Explorer, but it is possible to do so in IE9. IE9 also allows you to drag an individual tab out of the window to create a separate window, or into another window to make it an additional tab in that window, so Chrome no longer has that advantage over IE either.
I'm not foolish enough to say that IE9 is "by far the best," but it is what I use. Every browser has its own set of pros and cons, and depending on your browsing habits and needs, the balance of pros vs. cons will be different for each person. For my needs, the pros vs. cons balance has never been good enough in any other browser to outweigh the irritation of migrating from one to the other.
Posted by awgiedawgie
23rd Mar 2011
