Browser confusion
If only someone would drive a virtual wooden stake through the heart of the hateful IE vampire and put it to rest! I view my world via Firefox, without reserve. I came to this point by right of passage, using a long line of browsers that weren’t spawned in a basement in Redmond. Lynx, Mosaic, Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox. Fifteen years of HTML decoded with grace and speed. Still, there are those who can’t seem to get the idea straight.
This morning, I was busily transacting with a firm for goods. When it came time to arrange a payment method, I accepted with a long face that they didn’t accept my pal Paypal, and would rather that I feed them a stream of data from a “major credit card”. Which I did, only to find that my commerce was refused. No security code.
I contacted my card issuer, and was told to complete the form on a particular website. I responded, politely (after all, it was THEIR money, albeit temporarily) that I’d been there and tried that. And then it came to me; the person in the telecubicle meant IE when the term browser was used in conversation. I thanked my assistant for the insight, promised to call back if the fog of confusion didn’t lift, broke my connection and dug deep into my OS menu for “the other”.
Mirabile dictu! The site now offered many more options, and in a matter of seconds I had my security code. Still, given the security flaws inherent in this whole money tree, I would have hoped for better acceptance of other OS, other browser, other ways of seeing the forest for those trees.
For the record, the pool is closed. Too cold to swim, almost too cold to shut down. Summer is eight months away and (I’m) counting.
