(Side note: Here in the U.S., Tim Berners-Lee is on NPR's Talk of the Nation Science Friday tomorrow 11/1.)

Rant!

For political reasons, I have committed to not buy any more Microsoft products, to wean myself from Windows in general, and specifically avoid IE unless someone puts a gun to my head.

I use Mozilla/Netscape, Opera, and Konqueror. Each has its ups and downs. Opera is a bit behind on javascript support it seems that becomes a problem when visiting many of the more-complicated-than-they-need-to-be Web sites so prevalent today.

Much of the time I still use a Win2K for work stuff like Visio while VNC-ing to Linux boxes. I am trying to be happy with Mozilla under Windows, but it seems impossible. In my configuration anyway, it crashes on a regular basis on certain sites, and Mozilla 1.1 got to the point where it wouldn't run at all. I tried looking at the output of Talkbalk/Quality Feedback agent but it crashes every time it runs, too!

Oh, I know I have to take a more systematic approach to my tribulations other than deinstalling and reinstalling the latest version (no 1.2beta won't run, either!, and the menu bars on Netscape 7 are munged), but I just felt like a bit of a rant.

The one point that I am leading up to is that I have *not* had the same problems running Mozilla/Netscape versions from 4.7 up to present-day -- beta or not -- under Linux. Is it that I am not browsing there as much? Would I see as many crashes if I was? Personally, I'm feeling not. I feel like I am being stalked by some dirty, stale Registry entry or a psychopathic DLL.