Some thoughts for the future

[Mike McCarty]

John Summerfied wrote:

> . m a r c o s a u g u s t o wrote:
>
>>
>> It'll be so easy for linux os to be "the OS" in earth
>
>
> That would not be good. We need the diversity of alternatives, of 
> competition. What happened to IE after MS "won" the browser war? 
> Nothing. It's only now, after Firefox et al have had tabs for years 
> that MS is thinking of maybe adding this feature sometime.
>
>
>
I agree with the sentiment about diversity. No one size fits all. I like the
way Firefox is more adaptable than IE. More of the features can be
"customized". But you know something? Not all features even deserve
to exist. IMO, tabbed browsing is one of them. Not the best feature ever
dreamed up. I'd like all the features to be configurable, even disableable.
It would be nice NOT TO HAVE TABS AT ALL.

So, it seems to me, that your own prejudices are showing a little bit. IMO,
IE is better than Firefox in this respect. OTOH, Firefox does allow one,
sort of, to turn tabs off.

However, I can specify the "default search engine" to be
either "Google" or "Ask Jeeves", but I cannot specify "none". I can specify
where to open the search tab, but I cannot specify "no search tab".

As a more general comment, it seems to me that all options which are
configurable should be disableable. For example, I have a mouse with
a wheel, and the wheel is also "clickable". I find that I can configure
the third button to do any of several things, but "nothing" is not one of
them.

I'm not trying to dump on Firefox. I like it. It's more configurable than
IE. But IMO not configurable enough. I find that I'm frequently
accidentally doing things with the mouse because I can't just disable
"features".

I recall back in the bad old days when I used to use TOPS 10 on the
old DEC KAL 10 architecture. We had an editor TECO, somewhat like vi,
which would do "something" no matter what keys you typed in. The
fellows used to type in their girlfriend's names just to see what it would
do to their files. When every possible combination of key presses (I
include the mouse here) is bound to something, then all kinds of typing
errors result in inadvertent actions.

I say, as a general principle, if it can be configured at all, then there
is a reason: different people like/prefer different behavior. One of the
behaviors should be "do nothing".

Mike

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