Tag Archive for internet

Chrome is losing it's shine

I’ve been using Chrom at work since it came out a few weeks ago (not using it at home because there isn’t an official Mac version yet)  While I’m pretty happy with the overall features and feel of Chrome, it’s alpha software quirks are bad enough that I’ve went mostly back to FF3 for now.

I’ve had a few times where Gmail has started to become hosed.  I’ll go to do something (open an email, do a serach, send a new email) and I’ll get the “Working….” notice, and then the “Still Working….” and it just sort of locks up.  I won’t be able to do anything, and even if I click away and give up on what I’m doing, it just never really recovers.  If I do a page refresh, I get the status bar as the page loads, and it hangs at about 98%, and never finishes.  If I try to shut Chrome down, I’ll get ONE Chrome process that windows cannot close (that’s one of my BIGGEST bitches about Windows.  Damnit, an application should NEVER be able to refuse to shut down when the OS tells it to.  Any OS that doesn’t have complete overall control of running apps is faulty)

What’s strange is I think that the hung Chrom process somehow hoses my access to Gmail,  because at that point, I won’t even be able to use Gmail in FF3.  Rebooting the whole computer is the only thing to bring everything back to normal.

As much as I love Chrome, this has happened about 4-5 times in total already, and that’s just a hiccup I can’t deal with at this point.  I’ll wait till the first update and give it another whirl from there.  And I’ll gladly give it a try on my Mac when the OSX version is released.

Digital Rights Mismanagement

A year or so ago, I purchases an anti-DRM shirt on the interweb.  It was amazing to me how many people had no idea what DRM was, and I was often asked what the shirt meant (giving me a chance to give my little soap box speech on DRM)

But, people are starting to get a real life education on DRM, as some of the earlier players in the online music game are starting to get out of the business, and they are taking their authentication servers with them.  First, MSN announced they were closing the doors to their service (and have since backed off on the killing of the DRM authentication servers) and now, Yahoo! is doing the same thing.

I purchase a lot of music from iTunes, although I’m not pleased with the fact that a lot of their music is still protected.  I will use utilites to remove the DRM, just so I’m not stuck high and dry if something like this should ever happen.  I purchased the music legally, I shouldn’t have to prove it’s mine every time I want to listen to it.  I’m not doing anything illegal, so I shuoldn’t be treated as such.

Argh Annoyances!

It’s always pissed me off on the Mac in Firefox that the tab key will skip radio boxes. Tonight, I finally did some searching, and found the solution in about 3 minutes

I have NO idea why it took me so long to finally look that up and fix it. I’ve probably wasted more time bitching about it then it took to find the solution and change it. Talk about an efficient use of time.

BTW, while I’m bitching, websites that force your browser window to resize can link my taint. Web designers that do that need to be punched in the balls.

Someday, when I’ve wasted enough time bitching about that, perhaps I’ll send 4 minutes googling up the solution for that too.