Who’s laughing now?

I get a number of strange looks when people realize that I have a number of web browsers on this computer. I agree that it can be a bit of overkill. In addition to learning the nuances of each, there’s the challenge of keeping them up to date.

It could have paid off this weekend though.

I’m sure that you’ve read about the issue with Mozilla Firefox (a favourite browser of mine). If not, you can get up to speed here.

Around here, I live a better browsing experience because of add-ons. They add functionality and security to an already great browser.

So, what would I do without the browser functionality of add-ons? I’d just use a different web browser which is what I was doing anyway yesterday. Weekends aren’t devoted to a lot of time online – mainly posting a couple of blog posts and doing some reading. Had the situation occurred during the week when I was doing a number of other things, I might have been singing a different tune.

That tune would revolve around passwords. I’ve long bought into the idea of long, secure, involved passwords. (although it might be interesting to see what someone else would do with my logins…) I’ve also bought into the concept that you should never write the passwords down on a sheet of paper lest someone else get a hold of that paper.

So, for a long time now, I’ve used a password manager. It saves me a couple of grey matter cells for doing things other than remembering a password. But, what if I was using a single browser and access to that manager wasn’t available? The tone of this post might be bit different.

It’s Monday morning as I write this so I did fire up Firefox to see what the damage was. I wasn’t terribly worried as I read to expect an upgrade with a fix. Sure enough, when I checked, there was an upgrade available; I applied it and live goes on here – with add-ons.

How this will impact Mozilla and Firefox going forward remains to be seen. I’ll continue to use it; I’ve been a long time supporter.

I’ll bet that there are quality control meetings going on at Mozilla and elsewhere this week.

But, who’s laughing now? This guy. By dumb luck, I had a Plan B already (every teacher does) so I avoided this issue.