War's long done. We're all just folk now.

[ehowton]

Way back in 1996 I was thrilled when my local telephony exchange gave me the dot release for Netscape 1 on floppy disk. I eagerly installed it on my first IBM clone - what we called knock-off PCs from the likes of HP, Dell, Gateway, or then Compaq. I wasn't excited because I thought Microsoft was an evil empire - I hadn't even been introduced to unix back then. No, simply put (and this seems to be where ideologist have a difficult time following) Internet Explorer sucked.

But now there's Inori Aizawa, the visual onomatopoeia of IE11 (with what appears to be some sort of State Alchemist appendage). My kids watch plenty of Sailor Moon but I've seen enough hentai to know where this is going (NSFW).

Problem is, I likely don't fall into the demographic they're shooting for. And while I can certainly be swayed by some hentai-hinting-manga, I perhaps have a longer memory than those who grew up never hearing the machine-language negotiation of a dial-up modem. For example, younger generations might believe Inori's Facebook snippit to be plausible:

Hey everyone! My name is Inori and you can think of me as a personification of Internet Explorer. When I was younger, I used to be a clumsy, slow, and awkward girl. However, just like the story of ugly duckling, people told me that I have really matured and changed over the years. I feel confident in my abilities now, and I'm eager to show you what I can do. Why don't you get to know me a little better?

Awkwardly, that's not how I remember it. I remember her being dull. And obstinate. The kind of obstination which rises above and beyond her externally manifesting disability. Even if she wasn't the fastest, or prettiest, or most OS agnostic (I did run her on HPUX 10.20 once), even the girl that puts out is going to get some attention, right? Only she never did. There was nothing redeeming about her whatsoever - she even decided to ignore the standards which would have made her at least somewhat usable. But no. Both dull, and useless. That kind of trauma is difficult to move past; difficult to pretend never happened just because of a new polished exterior. I don't believe people are telling her she's matured and changed. I think she wants to believe people are telling her those things. Its a coping mechanism.

So she left a sour taste in my mouth the last time I went down on her and the memory of that far outweighs her newly imagined confidence. She may be turning heads and turning tricks again, but it hasn't been long enough to persuade me to reenter her arena just yet. Perhaps once Chrome goes the way of Firefox and they finally give up on Safari and Opera.

We'll see.

Comments

[missus-emm.livejournal.com]

Ha ha! For years and years I stayed out if the browser debate by using Maxthon. I stuck with them through Mx1, the completely changed Mx2 roll out and the not-that-bad Mx3 release.

This year changed that though. I'd was having huge problems studying my Webex classes through Maxthon and had to move to IE (which we use at work for all our web-based applications).

But then Google Reader went and when looking for a replacement, I realised Chrome works really nicely with Buffer and Feedly and I was finally converted. My main complaint about Chrone was that I couldn't use it for more than 10 minutes without it crashing but that seems to have improved now. I like that it saves your favourites and settings from device to device which was one of the selling points of Maxthon.