Internet Exporer 8 - total rubbish

I must be one of the few people left in the World who writes a heading like that. To normal people it is abbreviated to 'IE8', but there you go. Whatever to call it, I am far from impressed. This latest incarnation of Explorer has left me completely dumbfounded.

I downloaded IE8 a couple of weeks ago, and for one reason mainly: it's current. I have a longstanding fear of anything Microsoft not being bang 'up to the minute' for security vunerability reasons. Download went fine, and so did installation.

The problems began when I started using it. It will not start up without crashing once, and man, it truly crawls when it does decide to work. Microsoft have added one signifigant new feature too: when selecting something from the drop - down list of visited web addresses, you accidentally delete it off the list.

This seems to happen readily with everything except - strangely - Microsoft's own Hotmail. It's like MS took a good look at IE and went "so what can we do to improve it? - I know, let's disimprove it!". Explorer 7 was ( mostly ) fine, but this is a landfill incarnation of the browser.

I find myself using Firefox more and more these days, and suddenly Google Chrome - which I have to admit I liked already - is beginning to look a whole lot better. From my experience of the whole 'MSN Live' thing, I think Microsoft have given up altogether.

Never - ending innane websites

Okay, my website ( www.deadpc.net ) is never going to rival Ebay or YouTube, I accept that. There are, however, two things I can honestly say. Firstly, I take my website very seriously, and secondly, I work very hard at it. In other words, I do my best.

It seemed, in the run - up to the dot com bust of 2000, that every Tom Dick and Harry ( and Harriet ) was on the internet. I'm thinking of the plethora of truly vomit - inducing 'personal pages' in particular. You know the ones: "Hi I'm Jim and this is my beautiful wife, my 2.2 children and oh, this is my Ford Focus".

For some reason an awful lot of people seemed to think that the World was interested in their sad lives to the point of seeing pictures of an ordinary man, an ordinary woman, and countless pictures of ordinary cars and houses along with the occassional resume, just in case employers might have nothing to do but surf for lost ordinary people on the web.

Thank God for Facebook et al, for they have vacuumed most of these idiots off the main cyberspace. If you want pornographic boredom, you now know where to go and Facebook serves it well. Thank God for so much less of these 'Sites' that always began with "thanks for dropping by" ( the corniest line since "Do you come here often?" ) and "check back soon for updates" ( always accompanied by: 'last updated 12th. March 1998' or something like that ).

Now that the Web has died and has come back, the Irish experience would dictate that it is in danger of becoming a hoare again. Worried about mumps? - no problem. Just visit mumps.ie. We now have websites for events, websites for developments of new houses, websites for every kind of crazy non - reason you could shake a stick at. Are these the new 'personal page' rubbish of the future? - I think so.

What will happen when mumps become less sexy, when the developments of badly built and hard to sell houses are falling apart because the economy is in the toilet? What, more specifically, will happen to the joke websites? It seems everyone is registering names, regardless of how long or obscure and putting up largely pathetic - looking 'websites'.

I can only hope that Google develop their search - engine to cope with this. Otherwise, the web will be full of deadwood in a few years' time. I guess in a way the success of the web has come home to roost - and not for the first time. Victim of it's own success, and all that.