Lemme hear an oops...

[matgb]

Have I mentioned on here how much I like my deputy at work? She's really cool. Also, she's 8 months pregnant, and when I get back from my holiday, she'll have gone on maternity leave, so I won't be in the office with her again for ages...

Anyway. We're, amongst other things, a National Express agent. So, naturally, when travelling by coach, I book tickets through us as then I can bitch at people I know if there's a problem, and they can get better customer service than I can as a random mook. This is cool. Today, given that I'm off to Luton tomorrow, I had to book my coach tickets. That's easy, right? I've checked the timetable, I know how to travel and where to go, and I've done the journey before. All I need to do is get there two hours before check in opens, and the flight leaves at 4.30ish. So, the coach leaving at 7.30am (ouch) getting there at 2.20pm is perfect, right?

I mentioned Zoe was cool, right? Y'know why? Because, on my way to reception to confirm the tickets for the coach journey, she asks me if I'm sure I've got the flight time right. Of course I have, says I, and goes to check because, y'know, doubt is a good thing. The flight leaves at 3.05pm, the return flight is at 4.30. So arriving at 2.20 would be just after check-in closes, not just before it opens. Y'see, I'm going to miss Zo, because she does my organising for me. So, instead, I'm taking an earlier coach. It leaves Torquay at 5.30am. I'll say that again.

5.30am! This is me, damnit!

So, if I go to sleep tonight, there is a snowball's chance in hell of me waking up on time, even if I book a taxi and ask them to ring. So, um, I'm pulling an all-nighter. First cup of coffee already drunk. Expect random spam posts from me all evening, sorry about that. On the upside, I will be arriving at Luton airport really early. Wait, upside? It's Luton, it's not an airport, it's a glorified shed damnit! Good job I've got a pile of books to read, and they do at least have bookshops. Is there an airport anywhere that doesn't have a bookshop?

Firefox 2.0, theming it up good

Right, so many people I know love Firefox simply because it's not IE, right? Now, I'll admit, that's a good reason to like Fx, but despite this, there are some out there, people who seem to know what they're talking about, that still use IE, and actually like it. I have got used to the idea that sane, rational, intelligent people sometimes have strange ideas. This does of course mean that my friends list, who aren't really that sane or that rational, will have even stranger ideas. But I still don't understand a preference for IE. Ah well, YMMV, competition is good for us anyway (does anyone out there think IE7 would have been anything but a POS maintenence release if not for Fx and Opera? If you do, go get a stronger brand of coffee, please?)...

So, last week I finally succumbed, and installed Fx2.0. I'd tried RC1, and I just didn't like it. Fortunately, someone pointed out to me that you can turn off all the annoying features I don't like, and last night, I even explored the themes section. So now, not only is the red 'close tab' button back where years of UI training says it should be (it's an option in Tools/Options/Tabbed/Display), but my tabs will shrink much smaller (reduce the minimum width to 75 suits me) but also? It looks like Mozilla Suite! Yay!

Y'see, I first encountered this 'internet' thing back in '98, when I went on my Access to Higher Education course. I was 24. The college IT suite was ancient, running Win3.1, and the default browsers were Netscape. I didn't know what a browser was, but it let me mess around online, so I was happy. When I got to Exeter in '99, if you used IE, it would delete all your cookies and 'favourites' (stupid term, who thought of that) whenever you logged out of your roaming profile. But Netscape (4.5, ouch)? Netscape stored your stuff in your network drive storage, so I could stay logged in and remember by bookmarks. So, for two more years, all I knew was Netscape.

Then, we got internet at our house. Specifically, paulatpingu owned a PC, and had no problem with me spending my spare time when he wasn't there (and even when he was) trawling around fuelling my huge net addiction. This was good. He also forced me to learn to use the quickstart menu (and, y'know, why would you minimise everything to get to a desktop shortcut when you can just click an icon next to the start menu?), and made me use IE. I can remember when IE6 came out, he was oh so excited because of thing like the image toolbar on hover. No, I don't know why having something get in the way of the pretyy is better than right click/save image either, but, y'know, YMMV. I got used to it. Because, y'know, Netscape by this time sucked. Big time. So I got used to having favourites instead of bookmarks, I got used to that annoying click whenever I did something. Forgive me, I knew no better.

Then, on a forum, squirrel linked me to Netscape something or other. 6? Whatever. It was the one based on Mozilla, the first with tabs, etc. Also, I'd bought my own PC. It was a POS, but it was mine, shiny, and it didn't have the min-specs to do anything. But I DLd the new Netscape anyway. I discovered tabbed browsing. I rediscovered bookmarks in an exportable html file. I had a bookmarks toolbar. I had Google built into the address bar. I loved it. When I got my next PC, Netscape was, officially, dead. But by then I knew what Mozilla was. At this time, Firefox was known as Phoenix, and it was in early beta. But the full suite? It was sweet. Also, it didn't have an integrated and unwanted AOL messenger thing, and looked even prettier. I stayed with Mozilla nearly all the way through, and really only switched to Fx at the tail end of the life of that PC.

So, to me, Firefox isn't new. It's not about being better than, or different, to IE. Firefox is based on the original Netscape code. The Gecko rendering engine that runs it (and the now Seamonkey suite, and also the new Netscape) is based on the old Netscape source. Browser wars? Meh, this old fart likes to stick with what he knows. Firefox isn't new, it's just what I learnt the net on, with shiny add ons and a better logo.

ETA: a lot of cuts, co's this one is huge, sorry bout that, mebbe shoud've been two posts.

Comments

[freddiefraggles.livejournal.com]

I'm pulling an all-nighter too!

Well, that is... when I've finished my essay, I'm going to bed. But the rate at which I'm procrastinating at the moment means that it'll be 2am before I finish, and I've only got about 800 words to go.

[matgb]

Ah well. I'm reading your essay post no. Got the vox thing at work and got confused. I still don't see why people want them.

G'luck...

[nadriel.livejournal.com]

I'm not pulling an all-nighter, dispite how amusing it might be dealing with the horrors at school whilst sleep-deprived...

[matgb]

Well yeah, but dude? You don't need to.

[nadriel.livejournal.com]

I've started doing a lot more things I don't need to, just for the hell of it/the voices told me to/because I could.

[rho]

My first web browser was IE3, which I have to say that I quite liked. Then IE4 got released and I dutifully diwnloaded and installed it, and it sucked horribly. IE4 was the start of attempts to integrate IE into windows, with active desktop and all that crap, and it was slow, buggy and crash-prone. That was when I switched over to Netscape, and I've never really looked back.

Since then, I've generally switched browsers a lot, based on what was annoying me at the time. I used netscape, mozilla, konqueror, lynx, opera, whatever, really. I even used IE occasionally, though it was always a matter of hating it less than any of the other options. I'd generally stick with one browser for a while until it started annoyign me too much, and then switch back to something else which I'd not used for long enough that I'd forgoteen why it annoyed me.

I rather like firefox though. I think I've been using it for longer than any other browser in all the time I've been on the Internet. It still sucks, but it only sucks a little bit, which is pretty decent, really. It mostly does what I want it to.

[matgb]

You sound like Churchill. "Firefox is the worst browser there is. Except for all the others that have existed of course"

But you appear to have been online a lot longer than me, I didn't even own my own PC until 2002.

(and gah! The spellchecker doesn't know how to spell Firefox. Maybe I should turn the spellchecker off like I normally do)

[davidnm.livejournal.com]

The first browser I ever encountered was AOL's own one (my parents had AOL when we first got the internet ... when I phrase it like that, it sounds like a disease, doesn't it?). Anyway, the scary thing was, when I 'discovered' IE, it was actually an improvement.

I find it shocking that AOL still exists...

[matgb]

The scary thing with AOL is that the whole time they were issuing that thing, they owned Netscape, which was making a loss. They even gave Mozilla the startup money.

So why were they issuing their own browser when they owned something palpably better? Weird.