prickvixen | (no subject)

Well, I had to cut Firefox loose today. They removed the option to allow or deny individual cookies on the fly. It's just gone, both interface and backend. The 'official' explanation, if you care to dig through Mozilla's bugbase, is that such capability is 'not really nice,' which is what parents say to their four-year-olds when they act up. Coders are, in my experience, shamelessly paternalistic, so yes, no surprise whatsoever.

This is just a continuation of what Mozilla has been up to for a while now, becoming more market-conscious and shaping their applications with the 'average user' in mind. Previously they removed the 'Show images' and 'Allow Javascript' checkboxes for this reason. Mozilla has a picture of the average user which is kind of like a lobotomized Neanderthal wearing a diaper, browsing YouTube with one hand and eating Betty Crocker icing from the can with the other, and consequently we are far, far too stupid to know how to use the settings we ourselves select. Projecting forward, the ideal Firefox browser would be a single window with a set of pre-selected content sites and an on-off button. Hey, wait a minute...

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So what browser are you using?

I'm noticing a general dumbing down of apps and UIs, and generally taking control away from the user. That's not cool.
Also, I've got this weird bug where my eBay auction images are not loading. I'm talking about the ones I embed in my auction text, which is written in HTML. I use a simple IMG SRC tag and it's worked for ages, but for the past two months, Firefox just shows a broken image icon. If you right-click and select Show Image, it loads. The images show up fine in IE and Chrome.
I had some friends with Firefox look at my auctions and they can see the images, so I'm really confused.
I've noticed this on other sites I visit, so it must be my machine.

I hadn't quite noticed what a pig Firefox is until I started using a leaner browser. Everything loads faster now; in the last few weeks Firefox was doing this thing across all my platforms where loading a page with multiple images made the machine grind and the browser freeze. LJ was dragging with Firefox, too. I assumed that was the price of visiting bloated websites, but it appears that is not the case.

You have to understand that we're relics, though. We're from a time when people on the Internet had to know a little something about computer administration in order to use it. The primary trend in computing has been to make computers usable by people who know nothing about computing, and those users are the majority, and we are the fringe. We are a nuisance because we don't want to be in the box that business wants to put all customers into. We may also get caught up in the general contempt that programmers must feel for the idiot masses who have swarmed their playground for the last 20+ years. (I understand how they feel.)