In praise of multiple browsers

If you hang around this blog long enough, you know that I have this thing about internet browsers. I have a number of them installed and rotate through them just to stay on top of what’s new and what’s potentially coming.

It’s what I do.

Yesterday, I sat down to write my weekly summary post that I call “My Week Ending…”. I write and schedule it to go live Sunday afternoons at 5pm. The post is essentially a summary of blog posts that I’ve written and then a bunch of other things that I’ve learned in the prior week. Some are from my daily readings, some from YouTube, some troubleshooting I’ve done, and a picture that I might have taken.

Part of what goes into that post is a quick summary and link to the archive of the week’s This Week in Ontario Edublog live show on voicEd Radio. It’s there that I also let you know who Stephen Hurley and I had talked about on Wednesday mornings.

Now, the post itself is mostly written to fill a template rather than a new design each week. Maybe I’m lazy but, at least using the template, I don’t miss something.

The list of people whose blog we’ve featured is just overwritten from week to week. So, yesterday, I wanted to change

• Paul McGuire – @mcguirp
• Jen Aston – @mme_aston
• Larissa Aradj – @MrsGeekChic
• Kelly.McLaughlin
• Diana Maliszewski – @MzMollyTL

to

• Aviva Dunsiger – @avivaloca
• Jennifer Casa-Todd – @jcasatodd
• Lisa Corbett – @LisaCorbett0261
• Melanie White – @WhiteRoomRadio
• Elizabeth Lyons – @mrslyonslibrary

and have a bit of a shoutout to great Ontario Edubloggers.

Now, this is a fairly longish post, even with the template and I typically will sit down at my desk to write it. That meant using my Windows 10 computer and the Microsoft Edge browser was on tap for the day.

Things were going well as I worked on the post – I had even copied/pasted the URL to the show without a problem – until I got to the above.

It should have been a simple job. I highlighted last week’s five people and hit backspace to delete them and WordPress crashed, leaving me with this cryptic message on the screen. I thought that perhaps I’d opened a new window or something and so went back in my browser. Uh oh. That wasn’t where I thought I’d be. Damn. Have I lost everything? On a whim, I pressed the forward button and I was back to where I was before the damage was done.

Being the slow learner I am, I tried the same process and got the same crashed results. So back I was.

Time to change strategy.

I highlighted the text and pressed the delete key.

Crash!

What is going on here?

I restored and this time just highlighted the text and tried to paste over.

Crash!

Surely, I can’t be asking WordPress to do anything too difficult. I then did what I should have done a few minutes ago and actually scheduled the blog post to appear at 5pm. If nothing else, the post would go live with a bit of last week and a bit of this week. In another life, that would be called making a provisional backup.

Keeping that tab open, I opened an instance of Firefox. Throughout all the things that are happening in the web browsing world, Firefox remains a very stable go-to friend.

And it worked like a champ. So, I can’t blame WordPress, it has to be the Edge browser or one of the add-ons that I have installed. I checked and they are the same ones that I have in Firefox so there’s nothing different there. Well, maybe or maybe not.

For this moment in time, I’ll just blame the version of Edge that I’m using. I checked and there were no updates for it but they’ll come through when they do.

I’m fortunate that I had an alternative web browser on my computer to work around this. Often I read advice that indicate that not all browsers are universally compatible so try another browser. I was able to easily do this.

I’ve had little gotchas in the past but nothing that would have been the showstopper that this one was. To be honest, I hadn’t exhaused all of the options (I could have typed rather than copy/paste) but it was just so much easier to go to another browser. Thanks to that – this show goes on today!

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