Something broke my web browsers...
Two things happened over the past several days:

1) I undertook a spring cleaning of my hard drive, freeing up 45G of space previously occupied by thousands of archived photos, video, files, and obsolete applications.

2) I received a Windows update.

I should confess that I undertook the spring cleaning because my almost-2-year-old Vista machine has been becoming increasingly erratic. (Among the new errata, which preceded both these events: when I hook up an external monitor to the laptop, not only does it not recognize the monitor, but I have to go through an identical sequence of steps twice -- twice! -- to transfer display to the external monitor. The first sequence does absolutely nothing, although it reports happily. The second time it succeeds. Fun!)

I did the Spring cleaning over the weekend. Today I received Windows update KB955706 "Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition Service Pack 3" -- Not what you'd normally call the smoking gun. However, in the press, today is *also* the day that Internet Explorer 8 was released.

And the problem is: both FireFox and Chrome completely stopped working on my computer after this update. Coincidence? I would have to conclude it is, because I just don't believe Microsoft is stupid enough to release an update that breaks their main rivals (if Chrome even counts as a main rival).

Chrome will simply not start. FireFox crashes on (wait for it) attempting to load gmail.

I cannot quite believe this is a conspiracy; I feel I really ought to attribute it to my spring cleaning having pulled or reverted some library that FireFox and Chrome were using. Uninstalling and reinstalling Chrome worked, I'm still struggling with FireFox as I write.

But still. Part of me has to wonder. Part of me has to consider that for far too long I have accepted that while Microsoft is the evil empire, Windows is also the platform for an absolutely enormous amount of freeware, open source development, and grassroots innovation. All those latter things are good: but with the only cost being frustration, fury, and loss of hair, I could totally switch to Linux. I use linux all the time; I myself am almost exclusively a linux software developer (in server technologies, distributed applications, and other things that you mostly interact with via command line or http; never XWindows). So why do I scorn this alternative to the Evil Empire. (And before you Mac suckers get on your high horses again, let me say yes I have a Mac which I use for work, and yes it's tolerable, and no I don't think the Exiled Fascist Prince is any better than the Evil Empire.)

Ok, and I can already see the comments. "But today's linux won't make you tear your hair out the way last year's did." Listen up Penguins. I've heard that every year since 1997, and every time I need to try to optimize my screen resolution on Ubuntu for some widescreen format, or process Canon proprietary image format images, or edit proprietary video formats off my camcorder, or use that brain-tangler (but aptly named) Gimp image processing tool, or take even minimal advantage of power saving features on a laptop, I lose another inch of hairline. And if I hadn't been born with a *lot* of hair, that would mean I should be totally bald by now. As it is, I just don't look so much like a wookie any more.

Finally: between this entry, some previous discussions, and a number of twitter sourced conversations, I really should create a blog along the lines of "How can it be 2009 and every single OS still sucks?!?!"

(So conclusion: Chrome is a known problem with a known workaround, while FireFox 3 is a frequently reported problem with no known workaround. I guess I can't pin it on Microsoft, just on the fact that Microsoft has crappy library dependency tracking and code isolation. And that's a surprise?)