Browsers are Even More Relative...

[alfreda89]

My computer has been running slowly, and I can never get CTRL-ALT-DEL to bring up the running stats page anymore. So I thought I'd run a few things to see what might be lurking on my machine.

Spybot finished overnight. It didn't find anything on Firefox, my major browser that I have been mumbling against lately (it seizes up and crashes.) To be fair, This problem may be because I've been using NoScript on Firefox.

But NoScript may be taking care of other problems. Over on Chrome I've started reading several big, popular blogs with a ton of scripts. Occasionally, I have to use MS IE because a couple of sites only work on IE. (Literally -- I called the American Red Cross to find out why I could not access their classes, having tried Mozilla/Firefox and Chrome. Turns out their site doesn't access classes with anything except IE.)

Spybot found 27 tracking problems. Four of them were on Microsoft Internet Explorer.

23 of them were on Chrome.

So. Tracking is not interfering with Firefox. But Chrome is keeping very close tabs on everything I do. This does not help trying to reduce what Google finds out about me.

Interesting point -- one of Chrome's cookie trackers was using the machine's admin name as the tracker marker.

Maybe Chrome is going to have to go....

Comments

[alicebentley]

Thank you for giving me a reason to be content with my aging-but-still-works laptop. It's too old to run Chrome at all, and can't update Firefox to the point where it will stop complaining about plug-ins being out of date. But most things still work, and a new laptop is not in my immediate future.

Nice to know that there are unexpected benefits to my clumsy setup!

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

I need a laptop, and frankly, the hassles have escalated to the point where I plan to get an Apple MacPro laptop. I am sick of the PC problems. I think I've had about five minutes in the last ten years where everything was up to date, working, and not interrupting my actual WRITING which is the whole point of the computer.

You are not alone! My Dell tower is over five years old, and tho I grumble at it, it does a good job!

[kyahgirl.livejournal.com]

I like Firefox generally too. I have AVIRA running on my computer too ( a free antivirus program recommended by CNET) and it does a pretty good job of catching spys and malware. I have two kids who are also using this computer so sometimes it get internet crap on it...they aren't always sure when to click and when not to click!

Have you done all the basics like disk and registry cleanup as well as defragging? I am about half full on my hard drive and find I have to do the tidying up fairly often to keep it optimized.

[sheilagh.livejournal.com]

does American Red Cross REALLY not support Macs? There's no IE for Mac, anymore, hasn't been for ages and ages. That'd be wild and awful of them.

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

Good question. I went to find out if I was doing something wrong accessing the class lists. She asked me what browser I was using. I told her I'd tried Firefox and Chrome. That's when she said that whenever people could not access the class lists, she asked this question. And said that the site worked best with IE.

I did not think to ask about Apple. I also was polite and did not point out that the site did not work at all for 50% of what people go to them for, classes, with two other well known browsers.

Sometimes charities do not ask the right questions of their web designers. Some designers specialize, which is not what a big site needs. I am also surprised about ARC and this problem.

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

Thanks, I should check into that. I didn't want to mess with changing protection again, but Comodo has not worked as well as I'd like. AVG has fallen off. I was trying to avoid buying any more software for this machine, since I plan to change to Mac.

Yes, I did defrag. Have to remember how to clean the registry -- just dumped temp files.

But I'm keeping up an old nonprofit site, so this machine has to be protected. Not buying new web design software at this point!

[aishabintjamil.livejournal.com]

I tried chrome briefly and uninstalled it after it apparently broke me email program.

You might want to check out the free version of a little program called Ccleaner from Piriform. It goes through your system and cleans old temp files and other crap like browser caches.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

I called the American Red Cross to find out why I could not access their classes, having tried Mozilla/Firefox and Chrome. Turns out their site doesn't access classes with anything except IE.

My response at that point would have been, "Thank you for telling me and millions of other people that you're not interested in having us in your classes." *click*

There's no excuse for that on a customer-oriented website of any kind.

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

It does seem crazed, doesn't it? Even for a nonprofit.

But I need 3 more class hours before my license renews the end of July, and that would be the easiest way to get them - unless a friend teaches a class before then.

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

Sounds good, I'll check it out, thanks!

I'm waffling on the Apple laptop. I just cannot bring myself to pay 3x as much for a computer. This may not be the year I return to Apple.