Diary of an up and coming sociopath

I’ve been silent on this issue long enough. Something needs to be said. Not least to relieve my mounting boredom…

Now, I don’t want people to get the impression here that I have some kind of vendetta against Mozilla, the open-source movement, or other such fads. I am more than aware that Mozilla’s rendering engine is great, and I go out of my way to make sure my sites look correct in IE and Mozilla-based browsers. My problem, here, is in no way with Mozilla.

However, I really can’t understand this whole firefox movement which has become obsessed with tabbed browsing. People seem to like the one-taskbar item for multiple pages situation which they’re offered, it’s something that they frequently claim is positive reason to use firefox over IE. I don’t want to sound foolish, but the last time I checked, Windows XP could also do exactly that, with its grouping feature. A feature which enraged me so much, I turned it off, because it was fucking horrendously shit. A feature invented by Satan himself and coded by one of his lesser minions, I’m sure of it. Adaptive interfaces is a whole other rant, actually. Despite the fact XP has been offering what is essentially tabbed browsing with XP’s grouping, a whole bunch of people have become obsessed with Firebird’s ability to tabbed-ly browse.

So, okay, admittedly, XP’s grouping feature was crap. Maybe Firetapir does it better. So, and this is kind of my point here, why the hell are people attracted to tabbed browsing anyway? It’s only adding an extra layer of abstraction to what needs to be a simple process. Okay, you can only read one website at a time, but various transactional issues mean that having several open at once is a far better way of doing things. Very few people seem to browse exclusively while online, too, I usually have mIRC open, people have their mail programs, MSN, whatever. Using tabbed browsing in Firekomodo merely ensures that, should I be reading IRC, the probability that I can get back to a page I was using in one click is decreased by a significant percentage. More clicks means more time, and as we all know, the theory of monetary relativity states that time = money. Ergo, tabbed browsing is costing you people money.

So, of course, the other argument that people like to fall back on is the horribly blatant lie that firekookaburra is quicker. I don’t know what the hell you people are smoking. My PC isn’t the fastest in the world, but it takes as long to open a new tab in firelobster as it does to open a new IE window, and that’s not counting the fact that firejackalope had to be launched in the first place, where IE is resident as part of the OS. That’s near-instant loading times. Still, maybe on decent PCs, that’s not an issue.

Opera, back in the day, met with almost entirely indifferent results when it introduced its MDI web browser, so when we couple that finding with XP’s grouping feature going almost entirely ignored, I am forced to conclude that the thing people like about tabbed browsing is, er, the tabs. Which is fine, as long as you tabbed browsing psychopaths keep in mind that you’re all fucking nuts and wrong, many times over.