Web Browsers, and other interfaces

One of my collegues, let's call him Eric, pointed out that Mozilla has an option to pre-fetch the links from the page that you are on. This is the basically what I wanted when I wrote about "Agressive look-ahead." I suppose I should go download a recent Mozilla and try it out, but I've been watching the Mozilla project for a couple of years now and I've quit using it because I've determined that it has become so feature-rich (and slow) that it is as hard to customize as is Windows.

Now, Eric is an EMACS user (which I try not to hold against him) and enjoys programming in LISP so it is clear that he is not really a normal person. But he does seem to know more little tricks for adjusting his computing environment to suit his working style than anyone else that I know. Where I used to fiddle with making things easy for me to use, now I just resign myself to accepting the factory defaults for nearly every piece of software that I use.

I understand that it is probably not politically correct to wonder about this, but whose approach is better?

Mozilla has a truly staggering number of options. I (or somebody less lazy than I am) could probably write extensions to do many of the things that I was wanting. One of the things that I want from a browser is even in there. But I probably won't even try it. Why? Because I anticipate that the effort to just figure out how to turn on the optional pre-fetch the pages is more than the feature is worth to me. There comes a point where the cognitive load of managing the features overwhelms the value of the featureness. Excel hit this point for me about 8 years ago. I use the newest version of Excel just about the same way I used it on Windows 3.1 (whatever version that was).

There's a bunch of features in Excel that I know I'd like if I ever bothered figuring them out. Today I permuted a table into a matrix by hand because there it seemed like too much of a pain to figure out an automated way. I'll bet there is one in there somewhere. Isn't that kind of what "Pivot Tables" are for? Or maybe I needed to make a data area out of it, and setup the matrix as a bunch of queries. I just intuitively knew that it would be more trouble to figure out than it was to just do it by hand. All I wanted was to turn the numbers into a little chart, anyhow.

Oh, and I thought of another web browser feature that I've been wanting:

• Chrono-Forward and Back I leave my computer running 24 hours a day. I'd like to be able to tag some of my bookmarked sites as being of great interest to me. Then, every so often it could go fetch a copy of the page, images and everything. Using some clever logic to only store the differences between pages, the size of the data stored could be acceptable. Then, when I open those bookmarks, on my toolbar I get an extra set of forward and back buttons. Time travel buttons!