drewmckinney.net

Screw Firefox. Safari Sucks. Internet Explorer is dangerous. Opera can kiss my ass. Why isn’t there just a damn browser that works? I’ve used many browsers over the years and I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t like any one of them. None. They can all burninate as far as I’m concerned.

Firefox fan-boys are already composing vitriol in their stupid text editors, I can hear them now, angrily typing and mouse-gesturing at me. I don’t care.

I won’t use the tired cliche of “How come we can put a man on the moon…” because any jerk can put a man on the moon these days. Hell, it’s a freakin’ tourist industry now. So screw that. Instead I’ll go with, “How come we can build a technology that allows us to communicate with the rest of the world at nearly real-time speeds without using wires and we still don’t have a piece of software that allows me to browse the internet the way I want to without choking up and dying on the spot?”

I used Internet Explorer for years (maybe a couple anyway) because that’s what we had on the computers at work, eh, this was back in the days when regular people couldn’t afford computers of their own. IE worked okay. Nothing special about it (I think it was version 3.0 that we were using first…might have been 2, who knows…) but you could go to a website and find out some information so I guess it was doing it’s job. Eventually it was time to upgrade and version 4 was installed, then 5, then 5.5…and I think that’s when I stopped using IE. I was tired of bullshit worms and viruses and whatnot (freezes, crashes, punching the monkey…) and sought out other ways with which to enjoy and participate in the online world.

I had used Netscape on occasion (rich friend’s house, etc.) but I didn’t see anything about it that I liked. It seemed to run awfully slow. I didn’t know about such things as “bloat” or whatever back then but I think that maybe the version of Netscape that I was using was terribly bloated and hogged all of the available system resources (version 4.7??). I think this is when I switched to “Mozilla.”

Mozilla was different but I don’t know if it was better. I liked the idea of open-source (Mozilla was a Netscape project that was built with the open-source process and much of the code and architecture was different from Netscape) and wanted to worship the product but for some reason it seemed like the browser never worked for me…sometimes it was just too slow or I couldn’t access content or it would just shut down altogether. Yes, I know, it was my own fault for using beta software. Whatever, I can live with that. Thing is, it didn’t work the way I wanted it to.

A new project from Mozilla came along, something called “Phoenix” I believe. Phoenix became Firebird which later became Firefox. Some people forget this or don’t know about it but it’s true. Anyway, Phoenix was okay, faster than Mozilla for sure but it always seemed sort of…I dunno, half-baked. Things didn’t work all the time for me and I found myself having to go back to IE pretty frequently. Firebird worked okay most of the time but it gave me problems as well. Nothing seemed to work as well as IE and I found that to be extremely funny (and frustrating). Here everyone was bad-mouthing (with good reason) a browser yet all of the alternatives sucked and didn’t work either. I actually started using a text-only browser again (which I hadn’t done since about third grade), the wonderful-yet-not-the-full-experience-of-the-web-that-you-want known as Lynx.

Lynx is a fine browser but since it is text-only you miss out on a lot of the things that make the web, well, The Web. That’s really all I can say about it. I still use it for certain sites because of it’s lightning-fast load times but I can’t use it for most of the tasks that I need to perform daily. So it goes into a pile all by itself.

Sooner or later, those that seek out alternative browsers will find Opera and I was no different. “The fastest browser in the world” and “Waaay better than Firefox” and “Customizable like no other” are some of the phrases I’d either heard or read so it seemed natural for me to try it. It IS fast. Damn fast. Highly customizable also. Switching the user-agent is very easy to do although it doesn’t seem that helpful to me when I need it. User-agent? That’s what identifies your browser to a web server. Why would I want to switch that? Well, sometimes a site requires IE (by the way, this is the stupidest way to build a web site and you suck if you do this) but I don’t want to actually use IE so I switch the user-agent to sort of fool the web server into thinking that I’m using IE. Since it almost never works I don’t see why they bother having it there but it’s there…mostly though, Opera is too different for me. The interface just doesn’t seem as intuitive as it is for Firefox or Safari or, God help me, Internet Explorer. The browser works fine, doesn’t crash very much and renders pages super-fast so you’d think it would be a champ but I just don’t like it. Strange things happen when I use Opera and I can never quite figure out what the hell is going on.

I’ve been using Firefox again lately but it’s still not all that. Random crashes, random freezes, terrible resource hog, pages incorrectly rendered, and other weird shit as well. It’s probably the best one out there to use right now but that’s not saying much and will actually hurt users later as web n’er-do-wells focus their attacks on Firefox instead of IE. Firefox is fine I guess but there’s a learning curve in it that I think prevents a lot of users from switching. Most people don’t want to dick around with extensions and stuff like that. It will be interesting to see what happens to Firefox in the next couple of years.

Safari. Yeah, I know about Safari. I currently use a Mac and am pretty familiar with Safari. I have the same complaints with Safari that I have with Firefox, namely that I can’t get access to the content that I want on certain sites. Random crashes. Resource hog. Weirdly rendered pages.

OK, I know that the browser isn’t entirely to blame, being on a Mac has its disadvantages. I am locked out of A LOT of sites because of this. This is where I think browsers are failing. As the world moves away from the traditional computer desktop and more into the virtual desktop it seems to me that the browser becomes the OS and it shouldn’t matter what platform it is being run on. Why is it that Friendster sucks for me? It’s because I’m locked out of using an “advanced” feature because of my browser and/or operating system. It’s true. No matter what browser I access the page with (IE for Mac, Safari, Firefox, Opera) a little pop-up tells me that I’m SOL. This should not happen. While it sucks that people build sites only accessible to certain operating systems and/or browsers I think it is the job of the browser to handle that request for me and do whatever is necessary to tell the server on the other end to serve me up the damn page.

It’s not like I’m asking for a binary built for the Intel architecture to run the same on a Motorola-built architecture. I’m asking that HTML be read as HTML, the platform isn’t supposed to matter. Isn’t that why we have HTML in the first place?

Here’s why I think browsers suck: They don’t work the way they are supposed to. They are bitches of the web servers out there and get smacked around. A real web browser would be like John Wayne and not take any shit from anybody. It would handle requests for pages and serve them regardless of what the server tried to demand.

Picture the web server as a guy with a moustache asking you to borrow some fishing gear before you go take a look (for free) at the Grand Canyon. If you had the gear and really wanted to see the Grand Canyon it probably wouldn’t be an issue and you could pick up your gear when you were finished. If you didn’t have the gear though you should still be allowed to see the Grand Canyon, everyone else has been able to see it for free just because they were suckers and packed all of that gear with them. This is when your John Wayne browser would stomp the guy with the moustache so far into the ground that he would never bother you again and you could return as often as you like to look at what is free all the time for others. Instead, our browsers cower like puppies in the rain. They can be kicked around and locked outside so they don’t get the furniture wet.

Browsers will continue to suck until the people that make them begin to listen to the people that use them. They will continue to suck because web standards aren’t enforced and jackasses are allowed to write whatever damn code they please. Mostly I think they’ll always suck because the web kind of sucks. Sure, there’s useful information, if you can find it, but it’s terribly polluted with advertising and porno and fake sites and pop-ups and pop-unders and spyware and adware and scammers and such. It just doesn’t seem very useful to me anymore and I can hardly blame the developers of browsers for that.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 23rd, 2006 at 1:02 am and is filed under Random Blah Blah, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.