The tools our PC give us show the limit of what you can and cannot do with it. Sometimes, for whatever reason, we just have to use a particular tool that we hate. This topic is about sharing our stories.
My nemesis is the web browser. I hate the browser. I've tried many, believe me so many, different ones and I hate them all.
It's slow
My main problem with web browsers today, is how poorly they interact with the other tools on your setup. Your computer is equipped with Picture Editors, Movie Makers, Compilers, Text Editors, and virtually every possible application you can think of, and in order to interact with the content of the web, you still have to go through:
Open the browser.
Type the URL to the resource.
Save it on your disk.
Exit browser.
Launch my application.
Load the file from disk.
This is silly. I should just be able to acquire any resource online. There is no way for me to get access to my facebook pictures, without going through that noisy crowded place that is the Facebook. I don't want to see the stupid blue banner/logo and I don't want to sign in any weird chat system. I just want to open my pictures in Photoshop.
It's a stupid HTML reader
For some reason that eludes me, the online community has decided that delivering content through HTML was a good idea. The whole point of using a markup language is to make it easier for humans to read and ... really? HTML? It's a format so messed up, even regex aren't powerful enough to understand it!! If HTML is meant to be read by software, the browser, than why not feed it data in binary?
CSS is the devil. CSS gives senless "borders" and "layout" to the data I want to get. Oh how I wish I could surf on youtube directly from my media player (Oh wait I can!).
It has AJAX
Once the geniuses of the WWW realized how completely broken the html data format is, they came up with a new invention: AJAX. Now, who ever thought this was a good idea? (answer: Microsoft).
AJAX is basically giving the user access to the resource only through a piece of (obfuscated) code, running on her own machine. That sounds like a good security model! Up until recently, Javascript only ran inside the browser. That means that at best, you can come up with some stupid plugin to do any real work.
APIs are never really useful: Post a tweet, get user's follow list. What about running a grep through my tweets, or streaming the latest to my text editor? Those apparently aren't useful enough features. But the 'Like' button, that's important (+1).
The browser is big and bloated, does too much but allows the user too little. I've been using a very cool browser called uzbl for the past couple of months. It takes a long time to understand how it works, but it has quickly replaced my traditional web browsing habits. I just wish the content of the Web would adapt to this more flexible, meaningful way of accessing our data in the "cloud".
My nemesis is the web browser. I hate the browser. I've tried many, believe me so many, different ones and I hate them all.
It's slow
My main problem with web browsers today, is how poorly they interact with the other tools on your setup. Your computer is equipped with Picture Editors, Movie Makers, Compilers, Text Editors, and virtually every possible application you can think of, and in order to interact with the content of the web, you still have to go through:
Open the browser.
Type the URL to the resource.
Save it on your disk.
Exit browser.
Launch my application.
Load the file from disk.
This is silly. I should just be able to acquire any resource online. There is no way for me to get access to my facebook pictures, without going through that noisy crowded place that is the Facebook. I don't want to see the stupid blue banner/logo and I don't want to sign in any weird chat system. I just want to open my pictures in Photoshop.
It's a stupid HTML reader
For some reason that eludes me, the online community has decided that delivering content through HTML was a good idea. The whole point of using a markup language is to make it easier for humans to read and ... really? HTML? It's a format so messed up, even regex aren't powerful enough to understand it!! If HTML is meant to be read by software, the browser, than why not feed it data in binary?
CSS is the devil. CSS gives senless "borders" and "layout" to the data I want to get. Oh how I wish I could surf on youtube directly from my media player (Oh wait I can!).
It has AJAX
Once the geniuses of the WWW realized how completely broken the html data format is, they came up with a new invention: AJAX. Now, who ever thought this was a good idea? (answer: Microsoft).
AJAX is basically giving the user access to the resource only through a piece of (obfuscated) code, running on her own machine. That sounds like a good security model! Up until recently, Javascript only ran inside the browser. That means that at best, you can come up with some stupid plugin to do any real work.
APIs are never really useful: Post a tweet, get user's follow list. What about running a grep through my tweets, or streaming the latest to my text editor? Those apparently aren't useful enough features. But the 'Like' button, that's important (+1).
The browser is big and bloated, does too much but allows the user too little. I've been using a very cool browser called uzbl for the past couple of months. It takes a long time to understand how it works, but it has quickly replaced my traditional web browsing habits. I just wish the content of the Web would adapt to this more flexible, meaningful way of accessing our data in the "cloud".
