Curiosity got the better of me tonight and I downloaded the free firefox browser. I’ve only been using it for a short time but so far I like what I see. Very clean, very easy to use and it’s supposed to be free from the viruses that Microsoft lets you fend off for yourself. I didn’t look forward to starting over with all of the favorites and passwords that I’ve built up over the years with Explorer, but firefox imports them all automatically. Sweet. I’ll let you know how I like firefox after a few days.
Much is being made about an interview a few nights ago that one of the tv stations managed to get with the mother of Mayor Herenton’s baby. Peggy Phillip’s blog has an interesting view of how the story played out on the evening news. I can’t comment on how the story was reported since I didn’t see it. I haven’t watched that tv station’s news in 8 months. But what’s most interesting to me is all of the comments on Peggy’s website. Some of the comments were clearly posted anonymously by people from that tv station, I suspect at least one was posted by the n.d.
The bickering between the two stations reminds me of a story when I was working at another tv station. One of our reporters had been out covering a story for 2 or 3 nights. The reports were out of town and after each newscast the reporter and her photographer would look for a place to eat a late dinner. There were only two places in this small town that offered any food past 10 o’clock, the Huddle House and Waffle House.
These two all-night spots were right across the street from each other. The first night they ate at Huddle House, the second night they were in Waffle House. She says the manager of the Waffle House refilled their coffee cups and mentioned he saw their live truck at the Huddle House there the night before. He asked if the food was good across the street. They said it was fine, and then the manager said (I’m not making this up) “Yeah, well our food is so much better, they don’t have good service, they don’t have fresh ingredients, and they’re waitresses are jerks. Huddle House sucks!”
The reporter and photographer never went back to The Waffle House.
Competition is good for the customer. When competition is tight, it makes them try harder, do better to win the customer’s business. But the customer should never see or hear childish bickering between the two competitors because it demeans them both and leaves the customer with either a bad taste in their mouths or laughing at the immature or even childish behavior.
Is there a high road? And if there is, who’s leaving tire tracks on it in Memphis?
After you get a bit comfortable with FireFox make sure to go back and look at the Extensions list. These are small plug-ins to FireFox that do an amazing variety of things, most useful, some just silly. Some aid blogging, some give you in-depth control of the tabs, some are news and weather bots….
FireFox was intentionally designed with few “bells and whistles” features, to make it work quickly. The extensions are the bells and whistles.
Oh! I should also point out that FireFox isn’t immune to viruses. It’s just that it’s been used by so few people that it wasn’t worth the while of hackers, etc. Now that it’s more popular (estimated at between 5 and 10% of the brower market and growing), it’s attracting interest and viruses are starting to show up! Be careful.
There are various settings in Options you can turn on or set to “high” that will give you very strong protection. Make sure to do this, especially unchecking the “Allow sites to install software” option.
Firefox is a better built and much safer product than Internet Explorer, but it too can be hijacked. Watch the Mozilla page for virus warnings. They don’t come often, but fixes usually appear fast.
Jamey…I played catch up on your blog today. I agree completely that customers should not see the bickering.