Change sucks, unless you choose the choicest change

The infernal slowness of all things online has been taking its toll on my sanity. I am old enough to remember the dialup days, when I would type a URL into one of the early browsers (I started with Chameleon and then moved up to the new Netscape 1), and then you would just wait. Text would load, then images, and waiting was the sort of thing that came with the turf. Then came DSL, and lightning fast speeds came to be a new expectation.

Well, over the years, they — a sinister cabal of advertisers, code writers, anti-virus manufacturers, and assorted miscellaneous spooks who can neither be seen nor caught — glommed on to this once seemingly unlimited bandwidth and filled it with their shit. Things had reached the point where in the past year I have had innumerable fits over pages failing to load, endless script error messages asking me whether to stop the script or continue, and even when that doesn’t happen, pages will take forever to load while mysterious URLs that I am supposed to be “waiting for” appear in grey text. Naturally, they are ads.

The point is that even though I pay for what we call “high speed internet,” in practice this avalanche of unwanted clutter has made me feel catapulted back to the old days of dialup speeds.

A friend advised me that it’s probably time for a new computer, and yesterday I checked a few out. Bad idea. Too many damned choices, and even though I will fight for the right of people to choose, the reality is that choices suck. As Brian Tierney eloquently demonstrates, too many choices lead to a mental breakdown called “decision fatigue,” which is a disease. But on the other hand, being relegated to dialup speeds really sucks too.

I have an oppressive and invasive anti-virus system which says I am virus free, and my computer usually works pretty well by itself; the problem comes when I am online. I long ago stopped using the garbage-plagued IE and switched to Firefox because it was faster, but in the past year, Firefox seems to have turned into the garbage-plagued nightmare that made me dump IE. Is there something about software that means more and more clutter over time? It seems that with every “update” to a new version, it has gotten worse.

Anyway, while I was looking at computers yesterday and whined about my plight to the salesman (a very sharp geek who specializes in used computers), he immediately and emphatically told me that Firefox was the problem, and that I should simply switch to Google Chrome. (The same thing several commenters here advised the last time I bitched about the problem.) Bear in mind that the salesman had nothing to gain by telling me this, and in fact, he may have lost a sale in the short run. But by being honest, he gained my loyalty in the long run.

To return to one of the points in Brian Tierney’s article, I hate change. I am often willing to suffer endless torments from the devil that I know rather than risk the devil that I don’t know.

However, what caused me to try out Google Chrome this morning was the unsolicited installation of Firefox’s latest unwanted update. As I watched the damned sliding bar tell me it was reinstalling itself yet again, I remembered what the salesman said. Still, I was wishing and hoping that maybe, maybe this time, Firefox would restored to what it once was.

Alas! The next thing that happened was that Firefox hit me with a long list of now incompatible plugins — a seemingly endless array of Java script “thingies” that mean nothing to me and of which I am hopelessly ignorant and want to remain hopelessly ignorant as I Only Want The Damned Browser To Work. Or is wanting my internet asking too much? Apparently so. Firefox forced me to choose between searching for updates to the Endless Java scripts or ignore them. Why must I face such having to make such a choice simply because I tried to open my browser?

I thought, “OK that did it. Firefox, this time you went too far!”

It wasn’t difficult to download Google Chrome; in fact the entire installation took less time than the latest Firefox update. Guess what? I have my Internet back. All pages load flawlessly, and I have put it through my usual morning news reading routine. Not one delayed page load, and none of that “waiting for at.dt.cn” type crap at the bottom of the page.

Not only that, but as I write this post, the characters once again flow onto the screen at the same speed I type them! In Firefox, I had become accustomed to a lag between my typing and the appearance of text on the screen, as well as the refusal of the cursor to respond to the arrow keys when I back up. Now everything works. I am back to lightning fast speeds!

As to how long this seeming nirvana of having what I once had will last, who knows? Is it a delusion? Was I lucky? Or is there some rule about software along the lines of “the older it gets, the more cumbersome it becomes“?

If that’s the case, then software is too human. You’d think that would be something to avoid.