My Granny is a pretty tech-savvy gal which has led me to start calling her TechnoGran. She not only can program her own VCR but she was even able to switch over to DVD which she likes because she can see that ‘charming and handsome young Cary Grant’ whenever she wants. Heck, she can even beat me at some video games we play together from time to time.
I couldn’t believe it at first, but recently she asked me to do something for her that led me to the answer. I found out she was cheating! She was going onto the web and reading cheats and strategies on how to play those games so that she could beat me, good old TechnoGran.
It turns out she was using Internet Explorer 6 to do all her surfing and she started running into pages that didn’t look or act right. So she asked me to come over and look at it. Well with the prevalence and popularity of Firefox she had run into some pages that were made specifically for it and did not play well with Internet Explorer 6. So she wanted to know what was happening. Good old Gran was only peripherally aware of the browser wars that are raging across the web and so I had to enlighten her.
When she asked me why she should change to Firefox, aside from getting her latest game cheat site to work properly, I gave her the following list of reasons for it.
It’s like a 78 LP in an 8-track player – Firefox is rapidly becoming the browser of choice for millions. This isn’t just an it’s ‘hip and fashionable’ thing though, Gran asked me if it was like the Charleston but I didn’t really know what she was talking about so I just said yes. I have found that’s the best way to deal with those questions.
The power of Firefox lies in the way it handles pages I told Gran. It’s not just an “everyone is doing it so I should too� thing. It’s a compatibility issue. She said, “Oh I see so it’s like trying to play a 78LP in an 8-track player.� Again I wasn’t really sure what she was talking about so I just agreed with her.
Bob the Butcher or the Italian Guy on the Street? – I tried to explain a lot of security aspects of Firefox but she didn’t really get it. She didn’t understand a single word about the website certificates and authenticity system that it takes advantage of. She did grasp that getting more information about a site was particularly a good thing and that it would help her decide if she should trust the site and the information presented on it.
I basically said it was the difference between buying her meat from Bob the Butcher on the corner versus buying it from some strange Italian guy selling it out of the trunk of her car. Of course she said she had never bought meat from the trunk of a car but I have my doubts about good old Gran.
It’s just like a plastic couch cover – When I hear TechnoGran talk sometimes I’m totally embarrassed. She hasn’t got Tourette Syndrome but one might think so if you heard her swearing about all the popups and ads that she encounters when she’s trying to get those game cheats she loves so much. So of course I had to explain to her that Internet Explorer 6 has never been the best at blocking these types of things.
Of course while she’s technically savvy she’s not hip to the specifics so I had to explain it in ‘granny’ terms by saying that IE 6 is like a doily with all the holes where the ads and popups sneak through while Firefox is more like that plastic couch cover that doesn’t really allow anything through. At that point she nodded in understanding, or else she was just nodding off and I didn’t realize it.
More than Meat for Christmas – I wasn’t about to attempt to explain the extensible nature and framework of Firefox to TechnoGran so instead I tried to show her. I said “Look Gran, Firefox is like the perfect Christmas dinner. You can’t just serve meat, you need yams and ham and cookies and pie and fruitcake.�
Then I tried to tell her that Firefox itself is the meat of the Christmas meal while there are all these extensions and add-ons that can be included in Firefox to make it do a whole lot of other cool things. She of course said to me, “You mean like crafting new weapons in that online game I play? I can add new abilities and powers to it by embedding colored crystals?� I shrugged my shoulders and simply said “yeah I guess so.�
Bingo! Bingo! Bingo! Bingo! Bingo! Bingo! – TechnoGran has always been one of those do several things at once people. She likes to tell us about how she could feed one of her 8 children while dressing another and helping a third with their homework and still manage to keep Granddad out of trouble and well-fed. So it came as no surprise to me when I saw her with ten IE 6 windows open. I said “Gran, with Firefox, you only need one window and a bunch of tabs.�
She didn’t grasp that concept readily so I said, “Think of it like when you’re at Bingo Gran, the guy calls out B-10 and you scan your sheet of 6 cards and dab them all with your ink marker thing. It’s just like that; you can have six all in one browser window.� I had to explain that you can’t see them all at one time but you only need to click a little tab and it would move from one to the other so you could effectively have a load of websites open and not have the mess.
Aliens Wrote Internet Explorer? – TechnoGran, for all her pros, isn’t the most patient person in the world. I guess that explains her need to go read those game cheat sites to win. She just hates wasting time. So she asked me if Firefox was going to be quicker. I said that in general the browser does quite well at being quick as long as it is not burdened down with tons of add-ons.
She also asked if she was going to always get those strange gray boxes that had a different language in it. I wasn’t sure what she was talking about so she decided to show me. The strange gray box she was talking about is the error message that pops up in IE 6 when it has a problem with JavaScript or something else on a website. I told her that FireFox won’t show her as many but some of them are inevitable. She wasn’t totally happy with that explanation so I told her that many of those error messages would only show up in the error console. She asked me if I meant the television so I thought about how to explain it.
Preserves in the Kitchen Pantry
Finally, I said that she could think of the error console in FireFox like her pantry where she stores all those preserves she needs until it’s time to eat them. She doesn’t need to look at the preserves until she needs them for some reason and the
That was it, after all that explaining she was ready for me to switch her over. Of course she was worried about forgetting where all those game cheat websites were so I had to import all her bookmarks for her. I also imported her cookies and saved passwords because she said she always forgets what they were and didn’t want to have to try to find the tiny scraps of paper where she wrote them all down.
That was a couple months ago and I haven’t won a game against her since then. I guess I should have seen that coming. But at least she baked me a cake for doing all the work to get her up and running on FireFox and slipped five dollars into my coat pocket. Now every time I go over to see her she wants to show me some new thing she found out how to do with FireFox. Now she is getting all those game cheats sent straight to her with the built-in RSS reading and managed to skin her Firefox browser with some old wood patterned theme she said reminds her of time when things were built to last. At this point I think I’m going to stop playing games with her and only come over for Sunday dinner.
