I began a new job on Monday, and during the day, the subject of website development came up—specifically, what my level of knowledge in that area was. To illustrate with a concrete example, I opened a browser window and pulled up this blog and my personal site. I got a nasty shock. No, the site had not been hacked by a lowlife sending out X-rated spam, nor did the site crash the browser or come up as a disjointed, disorganized mess. I have tendencies toward obsessive-compulsiveness when it comes to a project I have voluntarily undertaken, so what happened was an unpleasant surprise for me despite its minor nature.

I am a Firefox user. I avoid Internet Explorer like the plague, because it is a security threat and is hard to customize to one’s own needs. I love the Firefox add-on database. (Lately I am getting very fed up with some antics of Firefox 3, namely its incessant crashing for no apparent reason and its multi-version, multi-release problem of RSS feeds causing it to freeze at startup. When Google releases a customizable version of its Chrome browser, I may very well switch.) However, Internet Explorer was the only browser available to me on the work computer, and I was immediately faced with the horror of cross-browser incompatibilities. I vowed to do something about this as soon as I returned home. (Read more…)