.Net Jonesie - Browsers and Home Pages

Saturday, May 13, 2006

Tim & Nic have been having a few thoughts about browsers and home pages of late and it got me thinking about how I do things. I'm mostly like Nic - I open IE 6 about 20-100 times a day and I often have 4 or 5 instances running. Yes, I've tried IE 7 but for work it was too unstable. I've also tried MSN toolbar for tab pages and Google toolbar but all they do is get in the way. I don't do any web dev work so IE 6 is more than adequate for me. At Home I use IE 7 as I can put up with a few issues there.

My typical usage pattern is to open IE, go to Google and search for something technical about a development problem I'm having. No custom home page is going to make that any easier than Google. I use BlogLines for RSS feeds so that I can read stuff at home and work - I used to use NewsGator but it broke a while ago and I didn't like any of the other aggregators I tried - they were mostly too slow and buggy.

I'm also not very good at saving favorites - mostly because I have too many, it's just easier to search each time. Sometimes, I wish I had saved a hard to find link in my fav's but usually I just have to repeat the 12 searches it took to find the page the first time.

If I was to have a customisable home page it would have to be:

FAST. I mean REALLY FAST - like INSTANT - therefore local and static
Editable in the browser
Synchronisable with my other machines

If I was able, I'd create a one page wiki in Java script that I could quickly edit and upload to a server somewhere. The search box in the IE 7, Google & MSN toolbars is as good as using Google for a home page and if I had the space I'd also have the address bar on my desktop like Nic.

As for Live I've commented on this before. It's definitely NOT fast. Even the default non signed-in page is slow. At work, I'm lucky to get 100k for Internet and home is worse (so much for Telecom's BS about next generation broadband). At modem speeds Live is Dead. I just did a quick test- with a blank Live page and NO gadgets it loads as fast as Google, maybe a little faster. This is good, but then what's the point? Your left with a page with just the search bar, much like Google. MSN search is as good as Google but it's not better than it.

I look forward to seeing the final non beta version of Live but currently, it's not for me. The current offering barely equals Google and as it's all about destroying.. sorry, competing with Google then Microsoft have a long way to go. But I'd put good money on them doing it. If I was a Google share holder, I'd be pretty nervous.

Now if Live had a gadget that gave me my one page wiki then I'd be very interested.

Saturday, May 13, 2006 9:42:18 AM (New Zealand Standard Time, UTC+12:00)

Comments [1] General |

Tuesday, May 23, 2006 10:02:57 AM (New Zealand Standard Time, UTC+12:00)

Hey - Netvibes has been my primary home page for the last six months or so and I love it! It also integrates with del.icio.us which I can't live without either for bookmarking websites.

stuart

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