It has a been a long time coming.
No, not this entry in the blog but my decision to (perhaps) say a final farewell to Internet Explorer.
IE and I have had a rocky relationship. Way back in the mists of internet time I was a devout fan of Netscape Navigator. Ah, how I missed thee. But then the world went a little but funny and the serif N was replaced by the resolutely sans-serif e and that dear reader was more or less that.
Yes, I knew about the security loopholes, about the often bizarre way IE renders HTML, and about the bullyboy tactics that Microsoft has used in the past to ensure it stays at the top of the tree.
I have dabbled with other browsers in the past – Safari and Firefox have both sat around on my machine, but ultimately I’ve found something about them that’s not suited the way I surf and I’ve retreated to IE, updating to each new version a good 18 months or so after it comes out so the bugs have been ironed out.
So what’s changed?
In a word: Twitter.
As some of you will know, I’m quite active on Twitter with my hyperlocal West Hampstead feed @WHampstead. When #newtwitter came along a few weeks ago I was interested to see the changes and the use of fancy new scripting that gives a more seamless twitter experience. But then in the past week it’s stopped working on IE8. Not completely, but that damn yellow exclamation “Error” triangle keeps popping up in the bottom left corner of my browser and I was constantly hitting F5 even just to access my list of followers. Worst of all, I couldn’t seem to access profiles in the neat new sidebar. The camel’s back was broken and I pointed my IE browser to the Firefox site.
Obviously, the first thing I did was check the Twitter page. It worked. Perfectly. And quickly. There were some bugs with importing all my data from IE (I’m not going to apportion blame). I then looked at some of the add-ons and found Scribe Fire, which apparently lets you blog direct from your browser.
Which is exactly what I’m doing now.
I’m about to press the “Publish to…” button and see if it works. I’m not entirely sure how/why I’ll use this to be honest. Although it might encourage me to blog here more often, and to post more shorter blog entries on my West Hampstead blog (which people actually read, unlike this one).
Here goes…
Welcome home, bro.