The Silly Reasons I Don’t Use Firefox

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One of the main reasons I don’t use Firefox and still use Internet Explorer has to do with how Firefox deals with drop down lists in web pages.  Drop down lists are often used on web forums to navigate to different sub forums.

Here you can see in Internet Explorer that items above and below the currently selected item are displayed meaning you’re less likely to have to  to scroll up and down if what you want is a few items down on the list.

In Firefox once you have moved to the middle of the list the currently selected item is at the bottom forcing you so scroll down to select lower items.

Since I spend a fair amount of my time on the Internet reading web forums and I use these drop down lists as my primary method of navigation though web forums this small difference really annoys me.

The other small thing I don’t like about Firefox is that the bookmark menu will close if I middle click to open the page in a new tab.  In Internet Explorer the menu stays open when middle clicking allowing me to open many pages quickly.  While I can do this in Firefox by opening the bookmarks side bar, I don’t like doing that as much since the side bar is a bit cluttered and I have to manually close it once I’m done opening pages.

So those are the admittedly silly reasons I still use IE, if it weren’t for those minor dislikes I would be using Firefox as it is an overall better browser.

Update July 1st, 2009

Firefox 3.5 was just released yesterday, and while it’s fairly awesome I’m still sticking with Internet Explorer for the reasons mentioned above.  Also as strange as it may sound to most, I actually (mostly) like the layout of the interface in Internet Explorer.

Update March 8th, 2010

I’m giving Google’s Chrome browser a try as my preferred secondary browser now that AdBlock is available for it.  Also I’m trying out LastPass as a replacement for Ai Roboform since it supports IE, Firefox, and Chrome since Roboform only supports IE and Firefox also because Roboform caused some minor graphical corruption in IE’s tab bar when it was setup to work properly with Firefox.

So far my only major complaint with LastPass is that it has crashed a few times in Chrome.

Unfortunately Chrome has the same favorites menu and drop down list behavior as Firefox that I mentioned which it preventing me from using it as my main browser.

New Web Host and Blog

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I’ve moved my web site to a new web host. I had been using tripod for the last 4 years, and while they’ve served me well, I wanted more control over my site and I wanted to use WordPress to create a blog which I couldn’t do on tripod.

So now I’m using Bluehost.com as my web host. Unfortunately I had some problems with transferring my domain name so my web site was down for about a week, but that is all sorted out now.

Since I’ve only just gotten WordPress installed and running on my site I haven’t gotten around to changing the template to match my site better or add navigation back to the rest of my site. So I’m going to have to learn a bit of PHP and how to work with WordPress before I can do that.

Once I get my blog set up the way I want it I plan to post a bit more often than I have been and maybe even start writing some mini product reviews and tech oriented opinion columns.

Dept Free Is The Way To Be

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I just finally paid off the last of my credit card debt that I’ve had since 2001.

In 2001 I got a Discover Card with a limit of $7500, I then apparently proceeded to lose my mind and within 3 months I had gone over my limit on that and my other credit card that I had with a limit of $750. At one point the most I owed was about $9500 and what really made things worse was the fact that this happened in the middle of a rather long period of unemployment.

So with some help from my tax refund I just now paid off the last $1500 that I owed. It’s going to be so nice not to have to worry about that crap any more and have some more money to spend on the things I want.

Site Updates and New Camera

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Once again I’ve been mucking about with the site design, unfortunately I didn’t bother to check if it looked alright in Internet Explorer 6 so it looked kind of messed up in that browser but it should work fine now. Granted it won’t look or work quite the way I’d like it to but at least it isn’t horribly messed up. (sorry to anyone that may have visited in the last few weeks)

Some older news: I got myself a digital camera near the end of November. This is my first real camera. (unless you want to count my cell phone) It’s a Canon PowerShot SD750 and it’s a pretty sweet little camera. Since this is my first real camera I’ve been taking a lot of pictures and trying to do some artistic shots. I’ve been posting most of them on Flickr so check them out if you want, and feel free to leave comments on them. (as long as you’re not too mean)

Flickr

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I made a Flickr account to upload my photos to since keeping a decent photo gallery on this web site was to much of a burden. I’ve deleted some of the photos on this site (like my Yosemite photos) and moved them to Flickr. I’ll probably be uploading a lot of the random photos I take with my cell phone now.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/patrick1978/

Hiking in Yosemite

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My best friend John and I went to Yosemite on Easter. We did the Upper Yosemite Falls trail which is a 7.2 mile hike with an elevation gain of around 2700 feet. We did it in a little over 9 hours, I probably could have done it faster but John is hecka slow. My calves are still fairly sore, but at least I’m not limping around like I was on Monday and Tuesday. I took a bunch of pictures with my cell phone that I’ve uploaded to the site. (moved them to Flickr 7/22/2007)
Yosemite Pictures

While I was working on that I redid all of the thumbnails for my picture gallery’s so that they have rounded and feathered edges. That required me to use PNG’s with alpha transparency, so now they won’t look exactly how I would prefer in any browsers that don’t support PNG’s w/alpha. (like Internet Explorer 6 and below)
So basically I ended up re breaking (but this time intentionally) something I recently fixed. To me the trade off was worth it, especially since it doesn’t look that bad in IE 6.