Hostile Environment


I experience web browsing on a Windows PC.

Tonight, I spent some time online on a Windows PC. It was not a user-friendly experience at all. The first thing that bothered me is that when I clicked on a link in somebody's profile, the computer did absolutely nothing for about 20 seconds before it finally opened the page in Internet Explorer. When the page finally did open, all of the text was disgustingly jagged. As a Mac user, I actually had trouble reading it. Text has been smoothed on Macs since 1997.

Just when I was starting to get used to the jagged text and the dark, low-contrast pictures, the worst stuff started happening. Pop-ups (or I guess these were the "pop-unders, since they appeared behind the main window) came in waves of ten at a time, and I believe they developed the ability to reproduce. While I was trying to get rid of these annoying windows, dialog boxes suddenly started asking permission to download and install software or change the browser's home page. I never have to go through any of this with Safari. Even Netscape has pop-up protection built in.

At least they now have iTunes.

Posted: Sun - October 19, 2003 at 02:28 AM      

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