Reflections

Well, when I saw that Firefox 3 was out, I immediately went to download it.  I have been happy with Firefox over the years, and expected another well-designed piece of software.

So far I have experienced the following problems:-  Gigantic text, which has to be adjusted every time I use the browser.  Gigantic pages, which are too wide for my screen.  These had to be adjusted by going to a very obscure file and altering some parameters.  This has worked on some web pages, but not, unfortunately, all of them.  Large icons, which leads to big spaces between lines of text.  The appearance of many sites is horrible now.  And most seriously, the loss of my Firefox 2 bookmarks.  I managed to recover my IE bookmarks, but not those I have accumulated during the years I have used Firefox.  As with the other errors I went to the support areas and tortuously made my way through the morass of technical information.  All to no avail, because I discovered that my Firefox 2 bookmarks folder had been overwritten with unwanted Mozilla bookmarks.

Losing one’s bookmarks is potentially so serious, I am astounded that Mozilla has released this software as it is.

I read somewhere that this is in fact a so-called ‘release candidate’ version of the browser, but there is no indication to that effect on the Mozilla site.

I am seriously considering going back to Internet Explorer, and you have to be pretty desperate to do that.

The so-called ‘anti-terror’ bill, permitting the government to extend the period in which a suspect can be held without charge for 42 days, has been passed this afternoon.

Gordon Brown described the legislation in terms of ‘principles’. He has obviously not learned that if you have a principle, then you stick to it, even if circumstances change. The kind of disposable morality exemplified by this legislation is typical of the way this government has been operating over the last thirteen years.

I started working for the Labour party when I was a boy, stuffing leaflets into envelopes. At the time, Clement Attlee was the Prime Minister. I was a Labour councillor for 12 years until I retired last year.

When I recall the work I did for the Labour party I feel nothing now but a sense of shame. They are pulling us into a world in which I, certainly, don’t belong. A world in which individual liberty counts as nothing beside the authoritarian posturing of a government of which all the great Labour legislators of the past would feel thoroughly ashamed.

Thank you, Diane Abbott, for a great speech. Had there been more than a handful of MPs in the chamber, your eloquence might have opened a few eyes. Let us now hope that the Lords will send this misbegotten bit of legislation back to the Commons.