Ask Felgall

I finally got around to installing the latest upgrades to Spybot last weekend and immediately had problems with Firefox loading extremely slowly (including slow script popups). Even switching between pages was slow.

Knowing that this sort of problem is usually caused by a plugin, I disabled all the plugins and the problem disappeared. That confirmed that the issue is definitely a plugin problem. I tried re-enabling the plugins until the problem came back and identified the Cookie Safe plugin as the problem one. Re-enabling all the other plugins except for that one meant that Firefox was functioning properly again and all my desired plugins were operational except for the Cookie one.

A quick Google search showed that this was a well known problem and also provided a solution - a CS Lite plugin that can substitute for the problem one providing the desired functionality without clashing with Spybot.

• IBM 1981-1995 - 15 years
• Microsoft 1995-2009 - 15 years
• Google 2009-

To me it seems like Microsoft is currently in approximately the same position that IBM was in 1994. Back then IBM was top dog on the PC and had been since releasing their micro-computer which they called the PC in 1981. We still refer to PCs and IBM compatible even though our current computers are thousands of times more powerful than a PC and are not compatible with anything IBM produce. IBM actually outsourced their operating system supply to a small insignificant company called Microsoft because Digital Research who they wanted to supply the operating system refused to talk to them. DOS was actually a temporary measure as was the original PC as Intel hadn’t quite got their 32 bit chip working properly yet. The plan was to migrate everyone onto AT computers running OS/2 as soon as possible but the popularity of the PC and XT computers made that impossible.

Microsoft released the OS/2 operating system in 1987 but few were interested even though it could run multiple programs at the same time and had a graphical interface. Still there wasn’t much interest in graphical interfaces for DOS back then either and GEM, Deskview, Topview, Windows etc were basically ignored. Even combining Windows and Topview (IBM’s GUI) together and releasing them as Windows 2 was ignored.

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A couple of quick reviews for Christmas. This first one gives a one paragraph review of several of the different tools provided by Google.

Google Tools