A suspicion has arisen that all standard browsers are made of china*. Bone china. I.e. as fragile as Wedgwood tea service.

The evidence is that it seems impossible to click on any given link without one browser or another falling over.

Each browser self-destructs in its own way. Each has its own list of unfavourites, with its own set of rules about the sticking point at which it will no longer follow a hyperlink.

I must have misunderstood Tim Berners-Lee’s original scheme, but I had the idea that displaying pages and following hyperlinks to open URLs were the whole points of a browser. I don’t care what else they can do. Using Netscape 0.0001 (or something like that) on dial-up would be more effective than using FF (latest update), IE (I admit to still having IE6), Chrome and Opera.

FF swallows memory as if it is running the space shuttle on the side. Ok, I had a few plugins but I’ve disabled them all and it’s actually got markedly touchier rather than more accommodating. It will die instantly if it doesn’t like a page. It makes sure it takes every open tab with it. At its most petulant, it takes the whole operating system. It then offers to reopen the tabs when you try to restart it. Naturally, it tries to open the murderous tab and dies again.

IE6 doesn’t top itself as readily but it can barely display any sites without spilling the main content down to its own new div at the bottom of the page. It has a highly developed aesthetic sense and often decides that some stylesheets are just too ugly, so it just won’t use them. It has serious attachment issues – it will often refuse to release memory, no matter how impeccable the shut down process has been.

Installing Chrome was shooting myself in the foot, in browser format. I stupidly let it nominate itself as default. That means, any link I click on opens Chrome. I don’t like its hairtrigger nature. A millisecond pause as the mouse passes over a hyperlink and its opened the page. I don’t like the open and close tabs buttons. I have yet to close a tab without accidentally opening half a dozen tabs each offering a “Most visited” that shows mini screenshots of sites that I have visited once – by accident (ref: the hair trigger bit, above) and which come back to haunt me forever.

Opera is the Gap browser (reference to Piers Anthony.) I forget its existence until I’ve already got frustrated enough to do impromptu impressions of someone with a terminal case of Tourette’s. (Terminal, geddit… Sorry) Then I have no passwords stored anywhere so I can’t actually get into anything I have any login privileges to. So I might as well not bother.

These browsers are studded with so many updates, extra features and dial-home-devices that I am seemingly operating an unpaid outpost of Mozilla, Google and Microsoft. And running the space shuttle.

Right, browsers, pay attention. I’ve had it up to here with you. Just open links when i click on them. Is that too much to ask?

*(That’s made “of” china, not made “in” China. I wasn’t suggesting that browsers might be forged or contaminated with melamine.)