10,000 Foot Developer

Browsers aren’t something that’s been all that important to me.  Compared to most people I probably know a little too much but all’s I want is for something to work, and to need minimal upgrades.  I like to have a few browsers around for development because it allows me to have two isolated sessions like cookies, server sessions whathaveyou (now there’s a FireFox plugin I could use, just don’t have the dedication to write it).

Anyway, FireFox is my current main browser and I am addicted to tabs and developer plugins.   But something that’s disappointing me is what a pig its become.

Recently during an upgrade to the latest 3.6.13 version on my XP notebook, FireFox said this to me near the end of installation:

Please Restart Your Machine to Finish Installation

What?  No way.

I don’t like this, not one bit.   Because it probably means its messing with the DLL’s, native things, and doing registry entries or maybe even service adjustments.  No sir I donn’t like this at all.

Now, supposedly doing this means FireFox will run faster on my machine “natively”; but there are implications for this approach:

1. They will have to keep up with an test even more deeply for every Microsoft, or Mac, or whatever OS update which is very, very frequent.  So in essence your browser starts to become nag ware.
2. Probably (a guess) the branches for each OS might get out of sync unless they closely manage their releases.  This has implications for people who OS hop quite a bit, namely developers or qa.   I like my user functionality to work the same on all machines.
3. I don’t know about you, but an application that just needs to be unzipped, not installed, and then just runs when you click it is awesome.    I don’t like service things or fancy integrations, they are always rife with problems.   For example, a certain installation on a Corporate XP machine would whig pretty bad with its Explorer integration on the file system.

I use this little suite of  tools for my PC called PortableApps.  I can do an unzip “installation” of it and inside it will manage plugins such as OpenOffice, 7-Zip, Notepad++, Gimp, Putty, VLC etc.    It works on any Windows machine.   I think all these apps work on Linux too, abut not Mac.  (Eclipse used to be unzip-and-run too).

They reason I mention PortableApps is because I want to do my work, have my user experience in an app the exact same regardless of the platform.  For instance, if I am maintaining music playlists, then if I use VLC as my media machine then the lists are simple to access and play across machines; I don’t need iTunes on one, Windows Media Player on another.  It makes life simple and portable; you probide the OS, and my apps and data are portable. I have spent countless hours looking for things like backup tools that work on multiple platforms to I could access the data from any machine.

In all fairness there are people who love their one OS and that’s why they pick it.  And to have things run natively would be great for them.   And for such applications — I have FL Studio which only runs on Windows — that’s excellent.  These really need to leverage the hardware.

I guess my case is an outlier.

But with the advent of the “cloud” I can even see portable platforms following people.   I have that now for myself, but only with a lot of sweat.