Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Chances are you nurture some degree of dorkiness, the gradation of which is a badge of honor around these parts. It’s not a requirement, don’t get me wrong, but let’s be honest: you aren’t here because you were the homecoming king or queen for three years straight. If you were, then I stand corrected. If you were both, I should give you this space tonight. Your story is fascinating, I imagine.

Something happened in the last 48 hours, and its arrival is pronounced in the online world. Firefox 1.5 is here. In the Church of Dork, this is a scant 0.5 less momentous than the Second Coming, a spectacle that urges nerdlings everywhere to vibrate fervently in prone position. I gushed about the browser a while ago, but my opinion has since been tempered.

The software is important. Everyone needs a browser, after all–it’s the glove through which we gingerly poke and sample the delights of the Intertron. This glove happens to be customizable and allegedly sleeker, which would be awesome if–let’s add some personification now–it didn’t shit its pants from time to time. For a program that boasts a smaller footprint than IE, there’s an awful lot of thrashing when I’m doing the multitasking thing, and heaven knows some websites don’t display correctly.

I logged into my bank statement today and beheld a balance of 0.00. That dog don’t get interest, let me tell you. After refreshing a few times the page displayed correctly, only to segue into an ugly rendition of my credit card website. Firefox is like the scrappy mechanic who does the job mostly right before leaving his wrench under your hood. So, like, the Duxler Tire of browsers.

But it’s free, so who am I to complain? Click on the icon to get it, if you’d like. Firefox is still a compelling browser, the poster child of a community that’s vaguely iconoclastic and, more than anything, is cheap.