OT: Internet question

[Fairlight]

On Thu, Jun 16, 2005 at 06:01:10PM -0400, after drawing runes in goat's blood,
Kenneth Brody cast forth these immortal, mystical words:
> 
> I don't find it hard to believe at all.  I personally know some people
> who believe that this is the way to perform a search.  Since the "URL"
> fails a DNS lookup, their browser (IE) will do a search on that string.

Which defaults to MSN with IE, but may have been set to something
else--whatever the default search was set to.  Now you can go to Google and
they have a deal that will -make- them the default search for that fasion.
That'd be a good idea.

Still...it's an -address- bar, not a search bar--no offense to anyone.  It
just strikes me like trying to use an airplane as a kayak simply because
both can handle the turbulence borne of fluid dynamics.  Wrong implement
for the task, whether it's cobbled to make you think it's intelligent or
not by searching wildly.

Personally, I'm with whomever recommended FireFox.  I switched a few weeks
back, and you can't beat it.  Get the AdBlock extension and you can cut all
the cruft and ads out of whole wide swaths of websites.  I must have a good
100 already suppressed, and the images and/or Flash cruft is just plain not
used, and yet the pages render intelligenly--it doesn't screw over the
layout when you do this.  It's very intelligently written.

And useless as it seemed to me before, I'm now actually a fan of tabbed
browsing.  Trying it for a week made me change my mind.  In fact, I have a
"Current Activities folder in my bookmarks, and whenever I launch the
browser, I go to that folder and just say "Open all in tabs", and *poof*,
I'm instantly on Google advanced search, my EverQuest guild page, the ToC
of whatever eBook I'm currently reading from my HD, and the Necromancer
spells page for EQ.  And I've finally managed to block all add sites for
the latter, which also blocks them from all other sites, since I wildcarded
intelligently when blocking.  Let's say I'll never see another DoubleClick
ad, or any of at least 50+ by now other ad sites' ads. 

If FF gets much more penetration, I wonder what the impact on the online
advertising industry will be.  I've literally stripped ads out of CNET,
CNN, and even IGN.  They can put up whole pages as intermediary steps, but
you can blow through them faster, and they're only hurting themselves as
people go elsewhere rather than subscribe.  It's gotta be hurting
subscriptions as well, since say, guildportal.com has a thing where for a
mere $30 a month you can remove all ads (no other benefits that I saw
mentioned offhand).  I can do that from the client side now.

As my wife commented when I gave her the tour and then she got it herself,
an hour later she said, "It actually feels like you control your browser
again!"  Quite true.

It's not perfect, but it's a far cry better than IE.

And it doesn't -just- have Google built into the toolbar.  Click on the
Google logo and you'll see you can select whichever search engine you want,
and even define more.  It came with like six or so by default.  Oh, and
there's a plugin that lets you enhance your Google results with links to
Yahoo and other engine results, apparently--haven't tried that one myself
yet, but I may.

mark->
-- 
             Fairlight - Being intelligent, so you don't have to!
         Egotist extraoirdinaire, and Keeper of the One True Way[tm].
                                    ***
I'm a right bastard.  However, this works out fine because Life's a bitch,
and thus we get on splendidly.