I went to Wincustomize this morning to dowload a nice wallpaper for Fall. Reading their index page, I discovered that members can now have their own subdomain pages (neato!), WindowBlinds 4.4 is out (cool!), and there’s another IE exploit going around (hurumph).

So I went to September 2004 Security Update for JPEG Processing (GDI ) to check it out, and was even gonna download the fix like a good bunny. Except I couldn’t, my IE permissions are apparently too stringent (I have it set on “Medium”) for the appropriate ActiveX controls to run to find out what updates I need.

Did I mention that I switched browsers the other day? LOL!

I’m now using Firefox now at home and work both. It’s cute, it seems to work, and I haven’t seen a single popup since I did (praise the Lord). It even pointed out to me an error in my CSS for Iowa Chicks Knitting that I didn’t know about because the damn page rendered just fine in IE.

I am always, always, always a late adopter. It’s just how I am – I covet new, cute technology but I don’t trust it. (And I hate to pay for R & D, but that’s another rant.) I know a lot of folks have already abandoned IE but I do like the bennies of the whole MS suite: it is cool the way the ‘net and the LAN and local files are all tied together. It is cool that IE and Office and MSN IM all work together (when they work together, that is).

But the popups on my work machine were the end for me. Closing hundreds of popup windows every day didn’t amuse me; spending hours trying to locate and remove the offending programs wasn’t my idea of a good use of time. (And since I work part-time I don’t really want to spend two entire days wiping my HDD and reinstalling my OS and all the apps I need. I’d probably have to come in on a day off!)

Switching to another browser solved the popup problem instantly. Firefox also has a few nifty little functions that I’m really becoming fond of, like the image rendering and Themes and general usability. I think I’m in love. Really!