I was quite saddened to see the news recently that SAAB are likely to disappear as a major car maker. Of course, they have not been the SAAB of old since they joined the General Motors stable but I still have very fond memories of my old 99. It was one of the best second-hand cars I ever owned – a real pleasure to drive and lot of fun. When I bought it, the roof had some minor damage from some sort of chemical spillage that had eaten into the paint but I got it for a good price and took it to a specialist for a respray. The guy was a big SAAB fan. I asked if the chemical damage was likely to continue to eat away at the roof. He gave me a withering look and opened up the bonnet. “Feel that” he said, indicating the thickness of the bonnet. I put the edge between my fingers and had to agree that this was indeed a fairly solid chunk of metal. He seemed pleased and then said: “There’s more metal in that bonnet than in a whole Ford Fiesta”! And he might well have been right.

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“Microsoft has reached agreement with European Union anti-trust regulators to allow European users a choice of web browsers. The accord ends 10 years of dispute between the two sides.” That’s what it said on the BBC news website last week. Who exactly are these guys? Did we elect them? I don’t think so. But we have paid out of our taxes to fund this petty and ill-conceived war – first over the bundling of the Media Player In Windows and then later the bundling of Internet Explorer. And guess what? I am, whether I like it or not , a European – and for as long as I can remember now I have had a choice of web browser. It’s not rocket science. I really do not need some puffed up creep full of his self-imposed sense of importance to tell me that I can download Firefox any tme I want to. Or Opera. Or Chromium. Or Safari. I have never been forced to use either Microsoft’s Media Player or Internet Explorer. And nor have any other Europeans. And how come Apple are not being hounded by these idiots? Do they not bundle Quick Time and Safari in exactly the same way?

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On a personal note, I recently discovered – or perhaps a better word would be realised – that I was wasting a lot of shampoo and conditioner washing where my hair used to be but no longer is. The hairline has moved a couple of inches or so backwards but my method of hair washing had not kept up with the times.

I can’t speak for Windows Vista as I have neither used it or even seen it in action but from Windows XP right back to MS-DOS version 1 the ‘Blue Screen of Death’ with it’s cryptic error codes was a well known and unwelcome feature that would flush your unsaved work from memory and make you scream with pent-up rage while making a solemn vow to perform more saves and backups in the future. And there was nothing for it, of course, except the power button.

Apple’s Mac OSX really is a very stable operating system but don’t let those legions of Apple fan-boys convince you that it never crashes. Of course it does.

But it does it with far more style and elegance. The preferred method seems to be a curtain of greyness that descends from the top of the screen, sweeping down to the bottom, a sort of ‘grey screen of death’ with grace.

There again, when things really become scrambled it reaches for the abstract as can be seen in these screen shots. It was quite amusing too. With every keystroke or movement of the mouse, the screen displayed a completely new look.

However, Microsoft may not have anything to crow about here. I was using MS Word at the time.

I know I have touched on this stuff before but I am as mad as hell with my MacBook Pro this evening and nearly felt like throwing it out the window. No – it’s Apple I am really mad as hell with and there is just a chance that someone might read this and let me into the big secret.

Internet access at hotels and public places can be patchy. On the whole – or at least in my experience – there seem to be three types of WiFi access ignoring the ones you have to pay extra for.

There are the type that just pop up when you open a browser and connect you up without you having to do anything. And they always seem to just work.

Next come the type that are secured with a WEP or WPA key and once you have entered the correct info they also just seem to work.

And then there are the completely free and unsecured networks often found in bookshops, small cafes and friendly hotels. According to Apple you just select the network in your WiFi list and it will just work. Like buggery it does! And it is always the open, unsecured type that give me problems.

Oh, it finds and connects to the wifi OK. All my little bars go black. But it never assigns an IP address and gateway. It seems totally unable to deal with DHCP and happily ’self-assigns’ an IP that is, of course, totally incorrect. At this lovely hotel I am currently staying at (Solvang, California) they actually have about 4 free networks busily humming away and I can’t become a member on any of them. And here is the real kicker – bloody Windows connects like a charm! First time, straight in. OSX? Hasn’t got a fucking clue. Mention this to Apple and they just repeat the same tired old mantra… ‘it just works’. No it fucking doesn’t!

So if anyone out there knows the secret of how you get the OSX network preferences to actually talk DHCP with a free, open WiFi network then please, please let me know. because I really don’t want to have to take a Windows notebook on vacation next time.

Before I switched to exclusively using Apple Mac’s I thought that the only web browser available to those poor Apple folk was the – at the time – newly released Safari although I do recall knowing that an old and ugly version of IE (5.5) was also bundled. It was not, of course, true at that time and it is not true today. The Mac platform is as spoilt for choice as users of Windows. All the major browsers are available with the one notable exception of Internet Explorer – a demon which Mac users remain, thankfully, not tempted by.

Personally I have been a Firefox user since the Phoenix days and before the switch. Opera I find too confusing and idiosyncratic. Safari may be relatively fast but I find it’s dark grey toolbars and borders foreboding and just plain ugly and much prefer Omniweb which also uses the same webkit platform. But I have stuck to faithful Firefox partly because of it’s wonderful plugin architecture.

But therein lies, I believe, both the strength and the weakness of Firefox. It can not be denied that with every new update it gets just a little slower at core rendering and while some of the plugins become indispensable, each one adds it’s own overhead. I have found myself becoming increasingly frustrated with the need to reboot my Mac because Firefox has, to put it bluntly, slowed to a crawl. But I like it – it does what I need – one or two plugins really are indispensable – so I carried on using it.

And then I was talking just a couple of days back to a guy who mentioned Camino. Camino uses the same framework and engine as Firefox but is both optimised for the Mac platform and has dispensed with the plugin architecture. It is a plain and simple browser without all the bells and whistles of it’s bigger brother. I tried it once a couple of years ago and didn’t like it.

I tried it yesterday and was, to put it simply, quite amazed. My own site here was displaying in a fraction of the time Firefox takes to render it. Other sites I regularly visit were suddenly popping up while Firefox was still looking for the progress bar. And the good news seems to be that Camino is not suffering from the same degradation that Firefox regularly displays. This – to me – is a revelation of some magnitude. If, like me, you looked at Camino a few years back, thought the centrally located tabs were a little weird and then dismissed it… load it up and have a go with today’s version. It’s just like the weather here in England today. Hot.

Web standards and accessibility are abstractions that the majority of internet users probably know nothing about, but for those that do it can become a passionate debate and crusade. We are talking cross-browser compatibility – where websites function correctly on all browsers on all computer platforms. And it is actually very easy to achieve – all it takes is a simple decision before the design starts that this is a goal.

Ten years ago when Microsoft’s appalling and non-standard Internet Explorer ruled the roost there was perhaps an excuse but that has long passed and even Microsoft has made some small headway into compatibility and standards – although they still attempt to lock people into their platform.

One company that seems almost proud to flout standards and by so doing, disenfranchise a potential market for their service, is Tesco. We have the letter to prove it and I quote:

 We don’t support either Mozilla or Opera browsers.

Signed by one Eve Hughes, Customer Services Manager.

So, if you are a user of the Apple Macintosh, you cannot do your on-line shopping with Tesco. If you are a user of a Linux platform you cannot do your shopping with Tesco. And if you are one of the growing army of people who have finally realised that Internet Explorer is just more trouble that it is worth, is a security black-hole and non-standards compliant, then you too cannot do your on-line shopping with Tesco either.

Which is why we are about to check out Sainsbury.