Technology Sheep, or is that Lemmings?…

Since I began using technology, especially, but not exclusively, the internet I have noticed something. We are all sheep when it comes to technology. I say this because the culture that has grown up around technology is one of recommendation and to a certain extent, blind faith. I, for example, used to use Internet Explorer as my primary web browser, simply because I knew no difference. Upon recommendation from friends however, I almost instantaneously stopped using IE, and began using Mozilla’s Firefox browser, of which I am now a huge fan and couldn’t do without.

However it isn’t always like this, and it might not have been. Maybe it is just me, but I have a tendancy to move everything across instantaneously and in one go to the new system, such as when I started using Firefox over IE way back when, pushing the boundaries of what I do and seeing how the new system can enhance this. If this works well then I stick with it and that is that – if however it does not then I am left stranded and have to pick up the pieces, back-peddle and try to get back to where I was with the old system. This kind of blind leap of faith is the only way, in my opinion, to see whether the new system is up to what I need it to be, and as disruptive as it may be, it is necessary if the change is to be made.

This brings me back to the title of this post. Just like the Lemmings we jump off the cliff into the unknown based solely on the recommendation of a friend, colleague or trusted web personality. Sometimes we land on our feet, and even do so on better terrain than we were on before – but sometimes we land in the water and have to struggle to crawl back onto the old familiar platform we have known and loved for years….

Web Browsers etc.

At home, I use Firefox on all of my Machines, be it the MacBook Pro I am writing this on, my Desktop Tower, or my very old (and very almost dead…) Ubuntu laptop. The main reason for this is Extensions. Firefox Extensions must be THE killer feature that can make up for the bloatedness and semi-frequent crashes. The secondary reason, is that I really don’t like the default browsers installed on most OSs. Safari has never appealed to me, mainly due to its incompatibility with certain things – the first example that springs to mind is the Google Talk app built into the GMail interface, which doesn’t even appear in the interface in Safari. On the Windows side of things, the primary alternative is Internet Explorer… Until the most recent version, IE7, there was no tabbed browsing which made it pretty much unusable for me, because the multiple instances of IEXPLORE.EXE in the Task Manager drove the system into the ground. I actually don’t mind IE7 too much, and find it works quite well for most things I need to do.

At school, we are still on IE6. This is, to be frank, painful. IE7 is not wonderful, but in almost every way it is better than IE6. Being a self-professed geek I spend a lot of time on the computer, and one feature I never realised quite how much I would miss is tabbed browsing. I await the day eagerly when, at the very least, IE7 is rolled out across the network, or, and this maybe wishful thinking, when Firefox is installed network-wide, and not limited to my tiny corner of computers at school – CompSoc!