The one thing I have come to loath about a (seemingly) good portion of folks who use the web, is the basic principal that every opinion should be taken as fact, any opposing view is a personal assault upon whomever authored or has read the original opinion, and everything is an over-reaction. Just look at any of the community driven news sites, every new product is a something killer, and just about any time [insert your favorite hated company here] releases a new product, service or changes a policy it’s the end of the world and an inexcusable injustice to the world community.
The latest is an assault on Apple for adding Safari to the iTunes update application. In efforts to get more folks to try and hopefully like the new Windows version of Safari, Apple has decided to add it to the iTunes updater application, and here’s the real kicker; they selected it for you by default! HOW DARE THEY! They are now acting like Microsoft, this shady underhanded manipulation of the trust of their loyal user base! How dare they make me, deselect a checkbox for a browser I do not want! Well, I never…..
I hope you’re catching my sarcasm here, because I’m laying it on pretty thick. This isn’t any different than Microsoft adding Live Writer, Family Safety, or Spaces to the last Messenger Update I downloaded. When I first started reading headlines about it, I thought for a minute that they were just installing by default in the background without permission – see; now that would be a bad decision. But instead what I found was that they were simply making people to commit to a positive opt out of the download. This is just one small example among hundreds – they’re easy to find.
This post on John’s Blog probably one of the most level-headed posts about it, and I would have to say I agree with what he finally concludes – but ultimately I don’t care enough to rant or rave about it. The real biting issue for me is how every post, article, or discussion has to always degrade to how it sucks, or how someone’s an idiot (or worse) with the consensus finally ending in a string of comments that you wouldn’t really want your kids to read.
An intelligent argument doesn’t always have to degrade into a WWE Cage Match.