Abandon Microsoft, One Step at a Time
Since I started writing online a few years back I have for the most part fastidiously avoided writing about technology. Maybe it’s for prosaic reasons, wanting to put my former life as a software engineer behind me. But that’s not exactly true—I’m a closet utopian, I love the frisson of the smooth-functioning machine. Maybe it’s because all the online writing about the online world reads sort of like all the writing about writing—all these weblogs out there discussing the ins and outs of: weblogging. William Vollmann may as well have been talking about the weblog world when he wrote in Conjunctions:
In this period of our literature we are producing mainly insular works, as if all our writers were on an airplane in economy seats, beverage trays shading their laps, faces averted from one another, masturbating furiously.
And this from a man whose own prose, if not insular, certainly borders on the masturbatory (just pick a page at random).
But for so long, I have both loathed Microsoft’s poor excuse for an internet browser, and equally loathed the lack of an alternative that had the few things it was good at (the Google search toolbar is the only one that comes to mind), that I am very, very pleased to have found a browser that does all the basic things well and much, much more besides. That browser is, well, the one everyone glorifies on their weblogs: Firefox. No sniping at me for not using OS X or Linux, now—I’m far too lazy to have migrated all of my unfortunate early Windows dependencies and habits across onto their faster, cheaper, more elegant, cousins (it’s sort of like ending a human relationship, changing operating systems—you have to disentangle yourself from all these networks and dependencies, and so often it’s easier just to rest where you are).
Besides the clear and immediate advantage that it is not developed by Microsoft, Firefox is completely extensible, which means that there are many visual themes and plugins available. I know you’re curious about what your humble narrator uses, so:
Theme: Smoke.
Extensions: Sort Bookmarks (self-explanatory), Single Window (Firefox has a beautiful tabbed window environment; this plugin forces any new window spawned by a webpage into a new tab instead), Open Book (displays the full bookmark tree when you add a new one), Allow Right Click (re-enables mouse right-click for those sites that disable it; great for downloading images, since a lot of sites merely disable right-click to prevent this), Session Saver (remembers where you were when you exit, restoring everything next time around), and BugMeNot (use anonymous, shared logins for sign-up required sites such as the New York Times; pay sites not typically present, as far as I can tell).
Maybe this will be a slippery slope, and I’ll end up writing about every little happening on my computer. I doubt it. But do get Firefox.