Internet Explorers

After being mocked by the entire population of the Internet, I reluctantly dropped Microsoft's Internet Explorer in favour of Mozilla Firefox. Actually, I lie, I switched to Firefox so I could steal music off MySpace. That was it, I didn't give a toss about the supposed "added security". I'm not a big target for hackers, because I'm smart enough to keep personal data on my computer to a minimum; and I always have a working firewall too.

Well, aside from being uglier than the Vista version of Internet Explorer, Firefox is pretty much the same - only with more add-ons than are necessary and the "new tab" button being buried somewhere in a sub-menu. Yeah, yeah, you can have a spellchecker on it, but if you can't spell competently, you shouldn't be on the Internet at all as far as I'm concerned. All that's really doing is opening the floodgates to an onslaught of arguments that look balanced because someone's using real words for a change, but on second look it's generally someone complaining that their Xbox died because it didn't like the taste of Fanta and no-one told him in advance. Aside from that, the spellchecker isn't all that competent itself either. Should you type in a complicated word being a bit sketchy on one or two letters, it'll get confused and offer you an array of completely different words.

I've had people telling me that Firefox is far more stable than Internet Explorer. Fantastic, I've always suffered extensively at Internet Explorer falling apart into it's basic coding every time I went on YouTube, maybe Firefox can remedy that... Actually, that's a lie, MS Explorer only crashed on me once, but that was my fault for dicking around. Firefox, on the other hand, has spent the last week coughing up blood every time I tried looking at an image or video. Then the tabs went a bit mental when I was trying to read comics while keeping an eye on my facebook.

OK, Firefox does have the useful feature of opening tabs you may have closed by accident... although you wouldn't close them by accident if they fucking thing didn't freeze and go mental at it's leisure. The download helper is pretty cool, once you install it, you can download any streaming media by clicking on it. Thing is, you have to be the luckiest son of a bitch alive to figure out which randomly named file is the one you want. Don't even think about downloading stuff normally, you're not allowed anymore. You can't "save target as" anymore, the download helper has it covered... badly.

"Right click > Download Help > Link a/b/c/etc > Left Click > Download.... > ... > ... > ... > Are you downloading? > ... > ... > ...> No"

Why the hell don't I just use MS Explorer instead? Well, there's the fact that it'll arbitrarily forget saved passwords, and occasionally decided to keep you in the dark while it does... something. I don't know what it is that it keeps getting up to, and I'm afraid to ask should it turn out to be some kind of Frankenstein-esque hybrid of all my sins and Internet bullshit. At least it doesn't give up on loading pages when it pleases. Whenever I've tried posting on forums this week, I keep running into Firefox's wonderful error message saying the page timed out immediately.

Don't you dare blame it on firewall settings, the bloody thing's set up as loose as I can get it, and if an Internet Explorer built for Vista will let me shove things on the Internet without any arguments, Firefox has no excuses. Maybe you'll start recommending task bars and the like to me, to which I say "go burn in hell". Extra task bars are not useful, I know, on an older computer I got stuck with about 5 of the bastards and all they ever did was try sending me to transsexual porn sites. All I was doing was looking at webcomics! Fucking comics! How do you get ladyboys from comics?!

Aside from being totally useless and inappropriate, all task bars do is obscure your view of the Internet. This isn't a good thing as it stands, but considering that all modern internet explorers obscure your view with tabs, address bars, search bars, menus, updates, RSS feeds (whatever they are) and massive icons; anything extra can go stuff itself.

There's the Google search bar, which to me seems about as useful as telling a dead dog not to steal your car. It's just not going to happen. If you want to use Google, there's no shortage of tabs (or windows if you've got the balls to use a really old version of whatever internet explorer you're using) for you to open the Google page in. Speaking of which, when I'm on the page I want to be on, the only searching I'll need to do is the "find text" kind of searching - i.e, I wont need a Google Search or Live Search or Wikipedia of whatever the hell people keep shoving into my internet explorers, I just want to find certain words! Jesus wept...

If you need me, I'll be rummaging through my inbox trying to write a nasty email to Apple for trying to make me use Safari on my PC just because I have iTunes for my iPod...