One of the things that is an annoying distraction in this life is software updates. Particularly software updates that should not have come out of beta. At the moment I’m reserving some significant bile for Firefox 14.0.1 and more particularly Adobe Flash 11.3. The trouble started about three weeks ago when Angie updated her copy of Firefox, and then upgraded Flash. Normally there isn’t an issue with Firefox and Flash, but Angie seemed to have uploaded the 64 bit as opposed to the 32 bit version of Flash. Videos would not play. Youtube became a closed book, and trying to do any video conversion on her eighteen month old Windows & laptop became impossible. Being the households tech support, I fixed the problem by uninstalling the 64 bit and installing the 32. Functionality was restored; videos would play in Firefox again, and I thought I was off the hook and could get back to work.

In all innocence I then upgraded my own Firefox Browser and Adobe Flash to the ‘recommended’ Adobe Flash 11.3 and Firefox 14.0.1 releases. Videos stopped playing in every browser. The only solution was to uninstall all four of my browsers and reinstall earlier versions. These are now working fine. Videos play, hyperlinks link, and all I seem to lose in some of the functions from, excuse my pun, the flashier advertisements.

Overall, this has cost me an equivalent of four writing days, because I’ve been too occupied or annoyed to focus on my work. As far as browsers go, I happen to like Mozilla based products, but not ones that shouldn’t have been released on an unwitting public.

I suppose you could say I’ve been firefoxed, and I’m not very happy about it.