yadda.

yadda.

So given my plentiful choices, I choose all of them. And I use all of them. Of course I am somewhat dissatisfied that I can’t have it all in one. More on this feeling in the words of Barry Schwartz, on TED.

So I mainly use Google Chrome because if you’re cool you use as many Google products as possible. Also, my brother says it’s really fast and caches everything just right, and so forth. I also dig typing Google search items straight into the address bar. Whoever thought of that deserves an award. So it’s beautiful, practical, simple, and fast. And it zooms each tab by itself, instead of how Firefox used to zoom all my tabs together. What can I say, I like giving my eyes a holiday and using Ctrl + a lot (I’m zooming this page right now).

But I still keep Firefox because it has the wonderful invention of add-ons. My favourite Firefox add-ons being Rikaichan and the Download Helper.

Rikaichan is a must-have for any student of the Japanese language. And judging by the way Japanese people struggle with their own writing system sometimes, maybe they need it too. After installing Rikaichan, you simply go to Tools>Rikaichan to switch it on or off. Then you hover over Japanese kanji and get readings and meanings. Great for reading that email from amazon.co.jp. Sort of. And then there’s also Tools>Rikaichan Lookupbar, which also works offline. So just type in some characters and get all the information you could possibly want—except maybe stroke order, that one is hard to come by. But there’s stroke count, underlying components, readings, the works. Rikaichan not only supports Japanese to English, but also to German, French and Russian.

The Download Helper is great for when you need to download something useful off YouTube. The latest version also has options available in the small drop-down menu, where you can choose to convert those pesky flv files into something tidier, like an avi file, automatically. And this add-on just does its own thing whenever it detects media. You just click on it when you want to download.

So that’s all brilliant. Why do I still use Internet Explorer at all? Well, as someone was quoted to me recently, it’s unfortunate that we all have to suffer because the web is still built for IE. I recently came upon this website—a great example of something that has never been tested in a browser other than IE. So there’s that reason.

Then there’s also the question of my internet at school. The setup is weird and ancient. Manually assigned IPs. Manual proxy. LAN cables everywhere (this country is not particularly wireless at the best of times—remember to ask for your LAN cable upon booking into your hotel). And before I reinstalled my OS recently, I had magically discovered that the very old version of IE that I still had lying around was the only thing that worked properly on this weird internet. Even with all the correct proxy settings, my other browsers kept breaking down. Google searches work okay, my Gmail works, my Gtalk works. But I generally don’t get further than one click into a website before I get a 404 or some other related message. But my ancient IE did not have this problem. Now I operate with an up to date IE with security turned way down, and when websites don’t want to go anymore, I copy and paste the link into a new tab, and then it works. It makes no sense.

But sadly, this way of living just makes me miss that old version of IE.