Friday, August 29, 2008

Regressing

Dear Mozilla,

Normally, you can do no wrong in my book. I love Firefox and have preached about it to just about everyone I know. However, I can't stand the thing you call the "Awesome Bar," at least not at work. It violates a little thing I like to call "my privacy." Like Microsoft with Vista, you forced a fix on me for something that wasn't broken in the first place.

I tried all the upgrades/tweaks/add-ons that were supposed to make it work better, but it just didn't do it for me. I'll try to get used to Firefox 3 at home, maybe, but at work I am going to be one of those bumps-on-a-log who reverts back to Firefox 2 until there's an option to disable the Annoying Bar. I just can't take it.

Love always,
Jane

5 comments:

Dan said...

What's the "awesome bar?" I haven't seen it yet. Maybe because I have to use Explorer all day at work and by the time I get home where I use Firefox, the last thing I want to look at is a computer screen.

BTW- my "capcha" word is "uqafup." Is that a new term for "fupa?"

Jane said...

It is only in Firefox 3. It basically turns the URL bar into a search bar, and includes all your bookmarks & browser history when you start typing. I'm just grumpy, as usual.

Anonymous said...

What annoys me about ver. 3 is that when you click on the little graphic next to the address, you used to highlight the entire address, so you can type something new in there.

Now, you get some sort of information about the site you're visiting.

As for privacy, I remember a quote by Scott McNeely, the Chairman and founder of Sun Microsystems. When asked about privacy, he said, "You have no privacy, get over it."

Delete your history. Wouldn't that do it?

Hank

Jane said...

I suppose so. And I did set it to delete my search history and not autofill with sites I'd bookmarked. If I'm honest (and not just knee-jerky), I'm not bugged because it's a privacy issue at all. I think the reason it irritates me is that it disrupts my way of doing work. Something that had become mindless to me (my way of entering web addresses) is no longer mindless, so I will be grouchy until I get used to it and it becomes mindless again.

It's like Office 2007. I was annoyed when they installed it at work, because I couldn't find anything. Now that I can find stuff again... Well, it's still annoying... But I can get my work done. I'm just a grouch. :)

Anonymous said...

Not grouchy...you're the consumer. I agree that it's a little creepy. I don't like autofill in general.

On LinkedIn, they have this thing called "you might know this person." I don't know how they know that I know someone, but they've been right a few times. It basically is someone you're not connected to who they think you might know. I don't know how, but it's eerily accurate.

This is just one reason I love my iMac so much...Safari is Firefox without the annoyances.