>But it sounds as if Barbara uses Firefox only to contact IBM. She
>probably wishes she could whitelist ibm.com and block everything else.
There are several reasons I held off using Firefox (and used IE instead):
a) The cookie management that I still heartily dislike - I think IE's way is
much easier
b) The fact that I needed a plugin to block javascript (the noscript plugin)
c) I cannot prevent pictures from being downloaded.
For a), I have resigned myself to it, but as Gil says, I wish I could use
the whitelist settings like in IE instead of having to let myself get
prompted every time. Just about every web site these days requests a cookie,
and it is annoying.
for b) I use the noscript plugin (and like the control it gives me),
and c) is why I don't use Firefox at home. I only have a 45kB analog phone
line, which is perfectly sufficient for 3270 work, but makes it impossible
to open any website - too many useless pictures. IE allows me to only show
placeholders. Does anyone know of a plugin for that? Or any other security
related stuff I missed? (I also use the BetterPrivacy plugin that detects
and deletes supercookies.)
As for IBM web sites on a 45kB modem: A website that has 65kB when saved to
my PC takes about 5 minutes to load. So IBM web sites are unusable on slow
connections. I haven't figured out why that is, I am not familiar enough
with what the javascript functions do. But I *am* capable of html
formatting! And know how to use style sheets.
>Is there a basic design conflict between use of cookies and redirection
>for load balancing? It seems wrong that the cookies should belong
>to, e.g. www-42.ibm.com and not www.ibm.com.
Oh, *both* of them use and want cookies. I have taken two screenshots that
show both ibm.com and ibm-9xx as having 16 cookies and modifying them. The
funny thing is that the Firefox prompt makes it sound like it is heartily
tired of the cookies, too ('the website xyz requests another cookie' - not
that it doesn't say 'yet another')
I have had it on good authority (from my very bright young neighbour who is
actually a clicker) that cookies are NOT necessary for *any* website. A
session id can (and should) be used instead, that expires after a certain
time. But of course, for clickers it is soooo much easier not to use
sessions ids, as session ids apparently require them to *think* about what
they're doing.
>BTW Another reason to contact google is geolocation:
>http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/geolocation/
Thanks for alerting me about this. Guess I should have read even more about
Firefox before I started using it. :-( Incidentally, this might be the place
where I can turn off showing images. But it has to be set per web site. And
how do I then display a single image that I may be interested in?
>Does IBM need to employ geolocation? For multilingual support?
Not for multilingual support. Changing the language preference in
Tools-Options-Content-Languages gets me from English to German or vice versa
(just like Christian said). But this is a global setting, and I refuse to do
it every time I have to go to an IBM website.
>>If I had the time and money I would go to the next Shareholders
>>meeting and suggest to the president that he contract with you
>>(Barbara) to manage the fixing of SR and making sure it is
>>24/7/365.24. IBM should be embarrassed to have something that is as
>>user surly, error ridden and with periodic unavailability as this.
Thanks for the vote of confidence! Unfortunately I never accept the
constraint that it must not cost any money to fix it, so do you really think
IBM is going to hire me?!? <tongue-out-of-cheek>
>Website developers are a new itinerant priesthood, spreading
>their gospel via airline magazines. They come in, often as
>contractors, screw up a site by applying the dogmas of web
>page design and radical ignorance of the objectives of the
>site, then move on to the next client.
Yeah, that's why every website 'improvement' makes it harder to use than
ever before. And since they all assume that everyone keeps their computers
wide open security wise, a lot of websites don't work anymore if you are
actually conscious about your privacy. And why the internet is rapidly
loosing its value for me. (But then I am a dying breed, anyway.)
>How long has this been going on? I'd expect complaints would
>have reached top management by now.
You mean within IBM? I don't believe that everyone within IBM really
embraces SR like we're told they do. Keep in mind that an IBMer cannot
really publicly tell you he hates SR and doesn't want it. You have to read
between the lines.
So PLEASE: If you're unhappy with SR, keep adding your voice to my list!
Sheer numbers might make a change.
Barbara
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