Check out the Lord of the Rings movie trailer when you have an hour to kill while downloading it.

Ok, so after several days of use I can, with clear conscience state that I hate the current release of Netscape 6 and I do not believe that is it any threat to Internet Explorer’s dominance in its current form. (I must say I am impressed with the adherence to standards, and applaud Netscape for this)

Here’s why:

  • Try entering a path in a directory or a local path. Nu-uh.
  • Try dragging a file into the browser window to open it. Nope.
  • The interface is horrible. There are so many things wrong with it I cannot begin.
  • Ok so I’ll try, first you can’t right click copy or paste from the address field (or anywhere else within the interface) Even cutting and pasting using keyboard shortcuts or menus is inconsistent.
  • The thing just doesn’t seem stable. I am not convinced that a Java application can be. I have had only bad experiences with client-side programs created in Java. Being cross-platform is great but not at the expense on function and reliability.
  • Try bookmarking a page. Haha.
  • The preferences screens are slow to change.
  • It may be fast to render pages once it gets them but it often isn’t fast about requesting pages.
  • Sometimes simply scrolling down in a page can cause the top of the page to get “all jumbled up” at the top.

Here’s another rant:

When you are at a play, musical, opera, wherever you may see a live event, don’t give a standing ovation unless it was really, really good. You should have been moved to tears, or laughing hysterically the whole time for a show to receive this honor.

I am sick of people giving “courtesy ovations” when a show is simply done well. Maybe the people who do this only go to the theater once a year and really think the performance was that good. Maybe the friends of the folks in the play want to be nice to them and start it off. These things have a sort of guilt-stupidity-lemming-like momentum thing going on — when someone stands up and you don’t you may feel guilty or feel bad for the actors or those already standing or you maybe think you may not be a good judge and didn’t realize the play was so good. Well, you will likely only see a couple dozen performances in your life (if you’re lucky) that deserve that kind of praise. Don’t cheapen yourself or the practice. You are really cheating the actors themselves from receiving sincere praise when they are superb, as well as, your fellow theatergoers by letting the actors think that’s all they have to do to get such accolades; they don’t have to excel. My advice, sit down, the performers know they shouldn’t get a standing ovation. You should too.

Something that does deserve accolades, however, is a site, assembler.org just launched by a friend of mine. The best things about this site, for me, are the subtleties like: draggable layers, movable blocks, and customizable background colors that “alter” the title image’s appearance. It is this attention to detail that is so impressive and he did all the DHTML by hand and on his own (also impressive)… now if he can only get it to work in Netscape 6 ;-)