I always read on New Year's "The List" in the Washington Post Style section. The list tells us, at the turn of the new year, what is IN and what is OUT. As always, many of the things listed failed to register. This is because I don't keep up with pop culture as much as I should, or as a good culture consumer should. But there were two things, digitally-related, that did register with me.
1. On the IN/OUT list, "Evites" were OUT. "Willfully ignoring Evites" was IN. I was so happy to be in the loop on this one. I've hated Evites for years and have occasionally ranted to friends who use them about how I don't appreciate being sucked into another ad-infested website, which is how I perceive Evite pages, since I'm surrounded by so many ads as it is, on- and off-line. So I've been willfully ignoring them for years. I may unwillingly read them to get necessary information, but I will not fill in the forms, check the boxes, etc. I will reply to the email that contained the link to the Evite, if I reply at all. But I prefer--I tell the Eviter--to get the info I need in the email and to respond to only that.
2. The Firefox browser was IN, Internet Explorer was OUT. Again, I was ahead of the curve on this one. I've been using Firefox, the new Mozilla browser, for a couple months now. I like it. It's nothing fancy, but it does the necessaries, including block most pop-ups. In contrast, ever since the big Service Pack upgrade of Windows XP, my IE browser has been annoying and wacko, too-functional and not-enough functional.
It seems to have been attacked by some worm or trojan or something because even though I have pop-ups blocked, THEY STILL POP-UP, even when I'm merely using the browser to look at a page I'm editing on my harddrive. At the same time, everytime I open a page with ActiveX scripts, an IE-generated popup tells me first that its wrestling with a pop-up, and then after I click on it to allow the pop-up, it tells me its an ActiveX script, which I have to click on again to make the page work. There may be ways to allow ActiveX scripts, but I'm too annoyed right now to fiddle with it--I just avoid using IE.
And in terms of the unblocked pop-ups, which are also highly annoying, I've found out that they're add-ons which I have to go into tools and individually block. Maybe there's a solution for this too, but why bother when Firefox does the job (and it has the added virtue of not being Microsoft)?
For near, and maybe far, future, Firefox will remain IN and Internet Explorer OUT.
Posted by jeb at January 5, 2005 8:55 PM | TrackBack