I crashed Mozilla Firefox. It would seem that over-enthusiasm with all the plug-ins made the thing inoperable. That is, it just wouldn't load the Web pages any more, and if it did, browsing was deathly slow.


As browsers become branded as operating systems rich with apps and plug-ins - and open sourced, for that matter - one might wonder if we're just going to repeat the past and have the same clunky issues that made Vista an unusable experience.  

The Cloud OS of the future, with all the sexiness that comes with knowing that it doesn't matter what computer you jump, you'll get the same hay ride on your main machine ... they'll sooner rather than later run pray to the same forces which spawned the "blue screen of death."


I'm running Chrome now with its promise of "fast" browsing. I have elected not to load it with too many additional bells and whistles.


I had once thought, "A browser's a browser. What does it matter which one I use," but I'm not convinced of that anymore. 


As most of what I do during screen-time is through a Web browser with only graphics and video editing happening on the local drive, I wonder, if this next wave of computing - cloud-based - is going to avoid the mistakes of the past. 


Likely, it'll be much like it was before with the tide-and-true computing ethics of back-up, save frequently, and practice safe computing by making sure you trust what you download, view, plug-in or click.  These will be the enduring maxims of a digital world.