I uninstalled Chrome

I have officially uninstalled Chrome off my both my desktop and netbook. After using the browser thoroughly for a while I gave it the boot because it just wasn't living up to expectations.

When I tell you what made me ultimately decide to uninstall that browser, you're not gonna like it.

It was because of IE8.

The reason I started using IE8 again was so I could write up some posts on how much it sucks. Yes, really. But ironically IE8 proved itself to be pretty good and ultimately led me to dump Chrome altogether.

Chrome's only feature that I will truly miss is the ability to grab a tab and drag it outside the browser into a separate window and back again. Other than that there's really nothing I miss about it.

And here's something you're not gonna like either:

There's no one thing Chrome does that's notably better than IE8.

If you said pages load faster in Chrome, you're only basing that off the benchmarks you've read about the browser, when in fact that in practical use the speed is the same.

If you said Chrome is more secure, no it isn't. It's on par with IE8 but doesn't exceed it in practical use.

If you said Chrome separates tab as individual instances of the executable, so does IE8.

If you said Chrome is more configurable, that's absolutely false. See "Advanced" in Internet Options for IE8 and tell me if Chrome has all that stuff. It doesn't.

If you said, "I like the developer's window in Chrome", hit F12 in IE8 and watch what happens.

I mean, seriously, there is no one thing Chrome does any better than IE8.

Do you want to know the latest "feature" the Chrome team has come up with? Autofill. Yeah, laugh at that, because it is laughable considering IE has had that for years. What was it called again..?

Oh, that's right, AutoComplete. Geez, nice way to "innovate", Chrome team. What's next, caret browsing? IE and Firefox have both had that for years too, so you might as well steal another play from their books.

Watch the Autofill video in the link above, and stare blankly in shock as Google tries to convince you that this is some wonderful new feature that other browsers have had forever. IT'S JUST PLAIN SAD.

Anyway..

Right now I only have two browsers installed, IE8 and Firefox. I only keep Firefox because there are specific extensions I need it for, but Chrome is gone.

End of an era

Finally laid down the boom and am not using rich@menga.net anymore. My contact page now has a form instead.

I kinda miss using Thunderbird 2.

But I don't miss the spam. :)

Undelete-able account fixed.. sort of

It really bothers me when a web service allows no way to delete your account. My classic example of this is AIM. Once you register an account, it's there for life. AIM offers absolutely no way to delete an account and never has. They also do not expire accounts either. If you registered an AIM chat account way back in 2001, guess what? It's still there.

For most people this isn't a problem, but for me it's about the principle of the whole thing. Okay, so you let me sign up, but now I cannot delete the account, nor can I ever? Seriously, that's just messed up.

Here's a short list of sites. Ones with YES mean you can delete your account and ones with NO mean you cannot.

• AIM (NO)
• Yahoo! (YES)
• Windows Live/MSN/Hotmail (YES)
• Google/Gmail (YES)
• Craigslist (NO)
• Flixster (NO)
• WordPress (NO)
• MeetUp (YES)
• MySpace (YES)
• Opera Link (NO)
• ICQ (NO)
• Trillian (NO)
• Twitter (YES)
• Vimeo (YES)
• Any forum (NO)

You might be wondering what "any forum" is. It literally means any forum. If someone self-hosts their own forum, chances are whatever software they use has absolutely no ability to let any user delete their account.

In fact, I have a forum account (on a forum-software web site no less) that was originally created back in 2005 that I can't get rid of. Sigh.

Anyway..

The story I have here is a weird one, but I guess the Internet wouldn't be the Internet without its weirdness from time to time. This one's about BlogTalkRadio.

On March 14, 2009 I signed up for a BlogTalkRadio account, but never used it. I know the original signup date because I have the original signup email. (Incidentally, this is why you should never delete emails - because sometimes you need to retrieve info from them.)

In earlier 2010 I decided to attempt and delete all the accounts I have out there that I don't use anymore, one of them being BlogTalkRadio.

I thought I deleted the account, but yet a Google search still showed I had a profile page on that site.

What's THAT doing there? I thought I deleted this..

I sent a support email on July 8, 2010 requesting help to permanently delete the account.

That email was never answered.

Sigh..

Being the site still showed a profile, I tried logging in with my old username/password. The system stated it couldn't log me in. I requested a password reset totally expecting it not to work, and I was right, it didn't work.

Then I had a thought:

I wonder what would happen if I tried to sign up again using the same email address and username?

Guess what - it worked. I was able to get back into the account even though it was supposedly deleted.

This... just confuses the crap out of me because it shouldn't have worked at all, yet it did.

I'm not complaining because at least I now have control over the profile I have there, which is just a blank thing with no content. It's nothing worth seeing, but the point is that I have control over it now whereas I didn't before.

I made no attempt this time to lookup how to delete the account, because if it didn't work the first time, it probably wouldn't work this time around either. I figured the best thing to do is just to keep the account active (I have the credentials in my password manager) and just let it sit there.

More often than not I'm finding that it's the smarter maneuver just to keep an account active that is "blanked" and dormant rather than make any attempt to delete it. It's annoying to have to do this, but at least you have control over any public information that account may show.

There was nothing on the profile there that bothered me. The point is that I thought I deleted the account, but that didn't happen. It was a like a half-deleted, half-not-deleted thing going on. Very messed up.

Yeah, I got it fixed, but.. the whole thing of how I regained control over it was just weird.

Okay, maybe Internet Explorer 8 isn't all that bad

I have IE8 installed on both my desktop and laptop because I'm a Windows user, and it's been a longstanding complaint since Windows 98 days that there's no way to uninstall IE out of Windows - that is unless you're a UK user which does have an IE-free version.

It's really easy to complain about IE when comparing it to other browsers, however as time goes on, IE is starting to suck less and less.

Just for kicks I launched IE8 and did some stuff I normally do. Use Yahoo! Mail, do some searching, read Reddit, Wikipedia, etc. My normal shtick.

The fact of the matter is that IE8 really isn't that bad. In fact it's not bad at all. If you use IE8 in "stock" form, meaning no toolbars and nothing which would dig its meat hooks into it (like, say, every security suite out there for Windows), IE8 is a good browser.

What makes IE8 suck isn't the browser itself but rather the mountains of shit other third-party programs stuff into it. When you eliminate all the shit and are left with nothing but the browser itself, Java and Flash, it works fine.

To give you a tiny example of what I mean by shit, look at Xmarks. Yeah, that Xmarks, as in the oh-so favorite bookmark/favorite-saver out there. It does put shit into IE that you don't need. The shit I'm referring to is the "Discovery" service Xmarks has. And did you know it puts that shit into Firefox, too? Yep. Sure, you can disable it, but how many people would know to do that? Not many.

Bear in mind this is just Xmarks I'm talking about here. Never mind toolbars, security suites that put useless "enhancements" into IE, instant messenger programs that dig into IE with their own meat hooks, etc. The list goes on and on.

When you take into consideration all the shit that so many programs stuff into IE, it's no wonder so many people hate it. It's like I said, take all that garbage out and IE runs like it's supposed to - as in normally, speedy and proper.

What made competing web browsers great isn't so great anymore

Let's take a look at the other choices and why they suck now.

Mozilla Firefox

When introduced originally, this browser was an absolute godsend because IE6, the current IE of the time, was a nightmare to use. IE6 was so bad in the mid-2000s that you literally could not browse normally without some rogue script compromising the browser. Seriously, it was bad times back then.

I dumped IE6 so fast for Firefox that it wasn't even funny. I was such a happy Internet user after that.

But then came Firefox 2.

Okay.. now this browser isn't as speedy as it used to be. Why is it taking up over 150,000k of memory just sitting there? What the hell is this shit? Oh well, I'll still use it because it's still better than IE.

Then came Firefox 3.

Well, all those cool add-ons I had for FF 2 just broke. Sigh.. But that's okay, it's still better than IE. Wait a second, it's using more memory than FF 2 did? OH, COME ON.

Then came Firefox 3.5.

Same memory munching as before. A bunch of add-ons broke again. And now the browser is crashing even though I have barely anything loaded? Geez, this makes FF 2 look like a dream compared to this crap.

And that's where we are right now with Firefox. It's only a shadow of its former self. Now it's a big fat pig of an app where you'd be lucky to run it for 20 minutes without it chomping up 150,000k of memory just.. doing nothing.

Opera

The Opera browser has never been good and has always sucked. It has never rendered web pages correctly, form control has always been wonky, the widget apps it has are worthless and it has the exact same memory munching problem Firefox does.

Don't use Opera. It sucks.

Google Chrome

Oh, what could you possibly say about the mighty Google Chrome that has gone wrong?

Plenty.

Chrome, while operational and mostly functional, is an unfinished browser.

It does not have any out-of-the-box solution to handle RSS while every other browser does.

The use of any extensions adds a whole bunch of chrome.exe processes. Install a few and then check the Task Manager. You'll see chromechromechromechromechrome. Stupid. Make sure to add up all the memory each chrome.exe instance uses when the browser is in regular use. It's not a slim on resource as you think it is.

Bookmark management is no better than Netscape 3.0 - and in fact is worse in some respects. I'm not kidding.

When downloading anything you get the download bar. Okay, cool. Oops, I closed the download bar by mistake. Can I bring it back? Nope. You have to CTRL+J to get that back or activate it from the menu, BUT IT LAUNCHES AS A TAB. Stupid. Firefox at least doesn't do that. If you close the download box by mistake, you can bring it back at any time again by CTRL+J'ing it and pop, there it is.

Lastly, and most important, is the wonky JavaScript engine in Chrome.

One of the biggest selling points Goog has about Chrome is that the JavaScript engine it uses is fast-fast-fast. Is it? Yes. But on certain web sites the engine breaks, namely in webmail UIs.

Ironically, Chrome never has a problem with Hotmail but does with Gmail and Yahoo! Mail. Where exactly? With anything that requires refreshing the content.

Example: You're in Gmail. You go to empty your spam "folder". Gmail says it's doing it, then hangs up. It happens sometimes. You pin the blame on Gmail being slow for the moment. Don't be so sure that's the cause. Load up Gmail in any other browser and you'll magically notice Gmail seems to run a lot faster. It's at that point you realize the wonky JavaScript engine is the problem with Chrome using Gmail and not Gmail itself.

If you don't believe me, try it for yourself. When you encounter just about any web UI that requires the refreshing of content on a JavaScript level, Chrome fails and fails hard. You won't see any error or anything like that. Instead the whatever-it-is you were doing simply won't complete, requiring you to manually refresh the page yourself.

Chrome is already starting to suck big time because of crap like this. Who would have ever thought there would be a JavaScript engine problem in a browser? Well, I'll hand it to Chrome, it has one. Congrats, Google?

And then there's IE8

If you can get past the fact that IE8 has a bit of a wonky UI (which it does and I don't deny that), a "stock" IE will display every web page you visit properly every time, all the time.

The separated iexplore.exe instances per tab keep IE from being crash-happy.

Flash content actually works better because of Flash's own ActiveX container (you'll see it in the Task Manager when viewing Flash content).

ALL forms on any web page always work correctly.

Love or hate IE8, when you want a browser that never has any issue viewing web content, IE is it.

Right now I'm using IE8 and Chrome 5 the most - in that order. The only time I use Firefox now is when I need to use a Firefox add-on for a specific function, such as downloading YouTube videos locally to my hard drive. Other than that, my Firefox is fairly dormant these days.

I never thought I'd see the day where I'd actually start using IE again, but given the current state of alternative browsers, IE8 is the old standby in Windows that always gets the job done when you need it to.

In China, I'm a popular guy

This is something I find weird but cool at the same time:

Note the "Friends" count at the top. Yep. Forty contacts. They all added me and I added back.

It's weird because I have never had that many contacts on a single instant messenger service in the entire time I've been using instant messaging.

It's cool because look how many on the list are online. Seventeen! That's almost half the entire list. The only time I remember seeing anything close to this was when everyone was using AIM back in the day - a long, long time ago.

Want to know what's even cooler? The list is roughly a 50/50 split between men and women, with more women than men. On top of that, I think with the exception of maybe 3 or 4 users, all of them have chatted me.

The most surprising part of all? This all happened in just a week.

For those of you out there that are thinking, "Yeah, QQ International sounds cool and I want to add you to my contact list", my QQ number is 1410526940. If you want to add me, the easiest way I've found is to click Search Contacts at the very bottom (you'll see it in the screen shot above), and from the window that pops up, enter my QQ ID there and I'll add you in.

Note that it's not required to use the QQ client to use QQ. You can sign up and use the web-based version (Chinese only) or Pidgin.

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