browsing is a world of hurt

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From: Simon Wistow
Subject: browsing is a world of hurt
Date: 17:07 on 04 Sep 2003
At work we use a heavily customised version of BSD and our own 
packagement system. Don't ask. There are good reasons or so I've been 
told.

During the course of my work I have to do a lot of stuff in a web 
browser. Some, nay, most of this is in areas where I have to be 
authenticated using our single-signon doodad.

Just now, my browser crashed. Again. This must be the thirtieth time 
today. As I was firing up the various windws I had open before and 
typing in my username and password a squillion times it occured to me 
that WHY SHOULD I PUT UP WITH THIS SHIT?

I've tried a variety of browsers - mozilla, firebird, galeon. Galeon 
used to work fine but for some reason, one day, somebody suddenly 
flicked the "look like ass" switch and all the fonts came out weird. 
Firebird and Mozilla looked fine. They all had the same font settings. 
Go figure.

So I start using Firebird. It starts off fine, then starts crashing once 
a day. Then practically constantly.

So I switch to Mozilla. Which is slow, And has some really annoying 
features (like switching immediately to a tab I've just opened). But it 
worked. Except now it crashes all the time as well. Muttering something 
about shmmap being out of space or something.

Fuck knows what that's all about. I'm guessing I may have to reboot.

Sometimes it mutters about illegal space access or something. And 
crashes. Nice. 

Oooh. It's just crashed again. Fan-fucking-tastic. And I'm putting up 
with this. I accept that this is a normal thing. Well, obviosuly not at 
the moment because I'm ranting to you but tomorrow I'm going to go back 
to accepting it. Because I have to. Because I have no other choice other 
than Netscape which seems stable and appears to be faster but which no 
fucker is supporting because "only 5% of people have it" and because it 
doesn't let them do their fancy fucking dotted line boxes round the 
meaningless, empty, hollow, self congratualtory wank that they spew all 
over the place. "We only design for IE, it's the market leader". NOT SO 
FUCKING FUNNY NOW IS IT YOU FUCKS! IE is abandoned, maybe to become part 
of the OS again (wasn't that decalred illegal?) but at the moment it's 
like some crippled half browser comapred to other ones.

So mostly Netscape is unusable. So I have to keep using Sir-Crash-A-Lot. 
What I don't understand is - why are browsers so fucking complicated?
Why do people seem incapable of writing a decent one (although I hear
that under the stable monocultured homogenity of MacOS X things are
fine).

I mean - they're not that big a deal. It's a document viewer. With a 
network retrieval layer. Yet they seem to have evolved into the most 
fricking difficult programs to write ever. They shouldn't crash. In fact 
- no software should really crash. Especially not from segfaulting. 
Memory corrupting is so 30 years ago. 

...

And again.

Fuck this. I'm going to go and get drunk.



-- 
the illusion of knowledge without any of the difficult bits  

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