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Why Can't Computers Just Trust Me?

Rant follows.

My Dad guilted me into fixing his computer today, which meant reloading Windows. And reloading Windows means sifting through all the bullshit Windows puts you through when you first run it.

Honestly, any time someone tells you Vista sucks because UAC prompts are annoying isn't looking at the bigger picture. The only time users really will have any issues with UAC in windows is during a fresh install of the OS, when things aren't configured yet and there's a lot of administrative utilities that need to be run.

But the bigger picture is that all software has trouble shutting the hell up the first time it's run. Take Internet Explorer for instance. The very first time you launch it, it's highly unlikely you're just merrily going about some internet browsing. You more likely just want to get on google real quick to find some software that needs to be downloaded. Or you need to grab Firefox. Or you just want to get to gmail. But upon launch, that horrid first time launch window comes up in IE.

Thank you for "choosing" internet explorer 7. Ha. As if I had a choice. Can I search the internet now? Well, you could, but if you don't click through this god awful dialog, you'll never get your home page, or even about:blank to show up when you launch IE. You have to take the time to tell it "No thanks, I'd like to use then internet, please." And even when you try and just use the search bar, first it has to ask you if you'd like to turn autocomplete on. Then it needs to make sure you're ok with sending information over the internet. Whoa! Sending information over the internet? That sounds waaay dangerous. Thanks for making sure I really want to do it!

Then if I want to go to an https site, it warns me that I'm being too secure, or something. Then if I want to go back to a normal site, it has to remind me of that as well.

And don't act like Firefox is any better. It has just as many dialogs for the same crap. At least in version 3 they're finally putting it on the top bar so you can just get to the page you wanted to get to without having to answer the dialog first:

Finally, a step in the right direction.

And don't try to close the browser with more than one tab open, because it'll nag you that you may be trying to close the browser with more than one tab open. Why did I press the close window button again? Oh yeah, so you'd close the browser.

I know I'm a bit biased, in that my job entails a lot of setting up new OS installs (Linux and Windows) and logging in for the first time, but in this day and age, a browser shouldn't warn you about sending information over the internet.

It doesn't even stop at software. I still maintain that one of the worst industry decisions in computers was to make you hold the fucking power button down for ten seconds before the computer agrees to let you turn it off. Whenever I'm pressing the power button, it's not because I have time to wait 10 seconds. Usually it's because the computer booted to hard disk when I wanted it to boot to CD, or something bad is happening and I need to cut the power before it continues, or because the damn thing locked up and I can't shut it down normally. I can understand having the power button initiate a software shutdown rather than straight-up powering it down, but if I want to, it should let me. I think a happy compromise would be to hold the button down for 1 or 2 seconds, but even that's a stretch. The honest truth is if it's a normal use case, and I just want to shut down the computer, I'd use the OS's shutdown function. If I'm hitting the power button, I just want the computer off. Now.

Posted by Ken on February 17, 2008 10:20 PM

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