Infrequently Noted

Alex Russell on browsers, standards, and the process of progress.

for engineers...by unix haters?

As has been repeated ad-infinitum elsewhere, there new MS Dev Toolbar for IE has made it much easier to get to a lot of the things that were previously buried under endless tabs and dialogs. It's almost at parity with the Mozilla equivalent (which is good, since its feature set seems to be a direct rip). But there's one place where I wish MS's slaving copying hadn't succeeded so well: the clear cache option.

On Mozilla/FF, the web developer extension pops up a dialog to tell you that it actually did what you asked it to. This dialog needs to be dismissed by hand in some way (enter, click on "ok", etc.). The "sheet" that this shows up as on Mac is noticably slow to appear, needlessly drawing out the process even further. IE now does something equally useless by prompting you to confirm that the action you just explicitly requested is actually what you want to do. Gratefully its asinine "look! I did it!" dialog auto-dismissed. Small comfort when your workflow has been completely destroyed by the previous dialog.

Why are these tools putting all of this in our face? Who cares enough that it actually cleared the cache to want to "confirm" it? Just freaking clear the cache already and let me get back to doing real work.