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I saw an episode of Yes, Prime Minister today. I haven’t seen this series in years, but it’s quite possibly both the most talky-talky and brilliant British sitcom. Whenever I see YPM, I’m reminded of Sir Humphrey demonstrating to Bernard how survey results can be cooked.

With this thought fresh on my mind, I ran into the Firefox vs. Safari link on Daring Fireball Obviously, feature charts are the same: The person developing them arranges it so their product gets the most checks. I decided to generate a more balanced feature comparison chart that would give Firefox and Safari an equal number of checks.

Firefox fan? Well, you probably won’t find this as funny as I do. You might even be deeply offended. But the thing is: I’ll still find it funny.

And for the record: I found Firefox 3 to be an improvement over Firefox 2 in most areas, but a major step backwards in complying with Mac behavior. I know they tried, but the closer (but definitely not perfect) appearance makes the poor behavior all the more jarring. But that’s starting to read like a review, and I’ll save that for a later post.¹

1. Or more likely never: the subject will probably be beaten to death by the time I get back to it. [↩]

Times, a newspaper-style RSS reader. But my advice? Skip it, unless you want demonstration of how not to do a product roll-out. Despite being a great idea, it feels extremely buggy. Worse, the application nags you so constantly to buy it — starting on the first day — that it’s hard to take what’s there seriously.

It’s difficult to explain how annoying this is, or why it would even be a problem. The best analogy I can come up with is this: Imagine a first job interview where every third sentence from the candidate is “So, are you going to hire me now?” So how long would the interview go on before you showed the candidate the door (or, in this case, the Trash)?

Well, I downloaded the trial of e, a poorly named but apparently quite capable text editor for Windows. It was a 1.0 release and not very stable, so I uninstalled it on the first day I had it and waited for an update. I downloaded the update yesterday to discover…

The trial has 2 days remaining.

That’s really all I needed to see. I immediately uninstalled it. e might very well be great software, but since I never really got to try it the developer is not going to get a purchase from me.

Anyone doing a time limited trial needs to seriously consider how it expires. This kind of 30 day trial doesn’t give me a chance to evaluate the software, and it doesn’t give the developer any chance to make a sale. The developer would be much better off using 30 days of use (like Omni Group products), or reseting the trial when the software is reinstalled, or even just resetting the trial for new releases. How many months in a row do you think someone’s going to do an unnecessary uninstall/reinstall just to avoid paying a reasonable $34.95?

Anyway, that’s all the feedback I have from a 30 day trial. Sad, isn’t it?