the IDIOT

it’s so trendy to slam microsoft products, usually with the fallacy of blaming microsoft simply because its popularity makes it a popular hacker target. that’s a worthwhile subject, but it must be discussed (as the article below sorta touches) as an economics phenomenon, not a microsoft failure.

i love microsoft products. never paid a penny for IE, and it works very well for me. i’m going to complain about a free product? on the other hand, i did pay many pennies against my will for microsoft to be smashed in the face by govgoons.

anyway, enjoy the following baloney from a supposed authority on PC software:

In fact, the future of Web browsing comes down to one word: tabs. I realized it the instant I fired up multiple pages in a single Opera program window. Just like that, I could browse a half-dozen Web pages with ease, jumping from one to the next simply by clicking on the little tabs at the top of the window. What’s more, I could open multiple tabbed pages in the background, so they could load while I looked at the page in the foreground.

tabs? what does he think the windows taskbar is? i use 99% dial-up access, and for efficiency do everything he just mentioned — in stock windows, with stock IE.

want to load a page in the background? shift-leftclick on the link, then alt-tab back to the original window. this can easily be done with 20-30 windows on most rigs — all loading in the background while you continue to browse previously loaded pages. it’s a common holdover from the pre-win3.x days for self-proclaimed windows experts to assert that you shouldn’t have more than a few windows open. bullshit! (on the contrary, some system resources in win 3.1 were lost until the next reboot whenever the same program was closed and then reopened.)

are your multiple IE windows getting stacked up in XP (a terrible product compared to windows 2000)? rightclick the taskbar, select “Properties”, make sure the taskbar tab has the focus, and then uncheck “Group similar taskbar buttons”. notice the underline in “Group similar taskbar buttons”? that means you can activate that option without the mouse by simply holding down alt and hitting the underlined key. don’t see the underline on your computer? hold down alt and you should. you can set windows to show the underlined letters without having to hit alt (previously the default behavior).

during research, i have regularly had over 40 IE windows open with good performance, even on slacker machines. right now i have 7 IE windows open, which is about normal for me. it’s easy to get back to whatever window i want with the crucial alt-tab keyboard shortcut or, if over 10 windows or so, the dreaded mouse. anybody who uses windows and isn’t aware of alt-tab isn’t computing efficiently. i’m not saying that other browsers don’t have cool features, but most of the people bitching about IE do so out of proportion to its abilities.

for speed when using windows, alt-tab is just the start. try ctrl-esc. while in a program window, try alt-spacebar followed by “n” or “x”. want to close a program without the mouse? alt-f4. want to close a child window (e.g., one of multiple docs in MS word)? ctrl-f4. want to cycle among child windows? ctrl-f6. once these and others are learned and established, you’ll blow away the mouse-bound slackers.

are you regularly reaching for the mouse to put the cursor in the address box of IE? screw that! just ctrl-o and start typing. but if you do that, do not then reach for the mouse to click “OK”; hit enter. or try f4 in IE for a similar shortcut. don’t like the dropdown list? hit f4 twice instead, or just f6. and don’t waste time hitting delete before typing; just start typing if the selection you don’t want is highlighted.

filling out a form in IE? tab your way through. go too far? shift-tab to reverse. done filling out the form? hit enter instead of clicking with the mouse. that will submit the form if the page is programmed properly.

do i need to mention ctrl-z, ctrl-x, ctrl-c, and ctrl-v (which, wonder of wonders, are in a row on the qwerty keyboard)?

using multiple IE windows with keyboard shortcuts, dial-up is great for almost all surfing that doesn’t hit large graphics, downloads, etc.; once you get used to it, you will not wait for anything but your first page during a super-duper news geek session. first you select everything into new windows, then you go back and start reading the first thing while loading like crazy in the background.

the state of users is just pathetic. i want to pry my eyeballs out watching most people use a computer. at my last job (100+ employees), i think i saw 3 people operating worth a damn, and only one of those was in IT. (for what it’s worth, 2 were women, and the other was a gay guy.) there were people whose entire job was data entry, and their speed was a joke compared to what they could have done using the keyboard effectively.

people usually think of windows as being a blessing because of the mouse, and because you can see 2 or more programs at once. ha! that’s so wrong. i always have to laugh when i see a user bitching about a small screen while his window is sized to 1/3 of the screen he does have. bigger advantages of windows were program standardization/multitasking [please don't email me telling me that windows wasn't multitasking; that's one of the most pointless arguments in PC lore.], especially in printing, and the standardization of keyboard shortcuts (windows clipboard!). while there are many shortcuts unique to programs, windows has a pile of standard shortcuts that you can now (after microsoft wisely switched to the apples convention for undo/cut/copy/paste) rely upon to work from one program to another. if you want to get more into them, simply look at the shortcuts listed in the menu dropdowns (to the right of the command), or search help for “keyboard shortcuts”.

think i’m full of it? i’ll race any mouse-bound freak in my fave programs (e.g., IE, windows explorer, MS access, MS word, MS excel, MS SQL server) — anytime, anywhere. if you’re not fighting monsters in a video game or modifying graphics, you probably don’t need the mouse for most of what you do on the puter. i haven’t even discussed the keys for selecting text. yes, it’s usually faster to select text with the keyboard than the mouse. don’t believe it? just watch while i kick your ass.

but mice can be wonderful too. one of the best, least-known features of a roller mouse: click down on the wheel instead of rolling it. if you don’t know, i’ll let you figure out what happens after that. you can read whole articles without touching anything after the first click and nudge (or better yet, down-arrow keyboard hit).

Tags: fallacy, keyboard shortcuts

Posted 20041222 01:04 under microsoft. Follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are closed.