Always a bridesmaid

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I just updated my browser and a few extensions broke, a few just worked and a few had been updated. As expected. I don’t usually install these things without a bit of research as I depend heavily on my Firefox extensions (Greasemonkey and Web Developer in particular) and wouldn’t want any breakage. It isn’t as though it’s never happened before and hitting the developers site before installing anything is always a good idea. Today, I was lazy and let the update process do it’s thing.

FoxyTunes is a dead simple little audio controller that sits in the bottom bar. What could go wrong? So I updated it without a thought and a few minutes little it did something. All by itself. It popped up a little window with links. I hate that shit and bugged, if I want a browser toolbar to do something I’ll damn well tell it to.

I clicked a link, to see what would happen, and a nice new Firefox tab opened with all sorts of goodness in it. Last.fm — I’ve been scrobbling since before it was a word. Video — I’ve never seen the ‘Mats live. Lyrics — I’ve always wondered what he muttered at the end. Flickr and Pandora — beta’d both. Then there were the usual Google, Rhapsody and Amazon suspects — gotta make a buck, ask Dvorak:

“Web 2.0 is the latest moniker in an endless effort to reignite the dot-com mania of the late 1990s. This one seems to be succeeding. The problem is that little has changed. Bad ideas of the past have been renamed and spiffed up. We’re watching a classic example of “old wine in new bottles”: Changing the label doesn’t make the wine any better, but it does get us to buy more wine.”

Most of the above are services that I use and, who knows, I might even buy an album. Knowing WTF Paul muttered at the end of the song is worth every cent and kicking a little back might help keep all this Web 2.0 stuff around.

Despite the opinion of self-parodizing trolls.

If you need any convincing of how out of touch Dvorak and his ilk are, just follow the link to his column in PC Mag. Just be sure to turn down your speakers before the loud, and ugly, Flash ad loads — on every single page of a four page article.