I'd like to take a moment from my busy work day and thank whatever brainiac at Microsoft came up with the bright idea of having Internet Explorer's "status bar" default to "off". Truly, this little enhancement was was a great leap forward for Web usability. I mean, hell, why would we want users to know where a hyperlink was going to send them next?
Yes, this is sarcasm.
For those who don't know, the "status bar" appears (or rather, appeared) at the bottom of every Internet Explorer's browser window. If you moused over a hyperlink on a Web page, the full web address for that link would appear in the status bar. It's a subtle thing, probably lost on most users, but when you spend your day coding and testing Web sites, like I do, it is an important tool. It lets me check a link without actually having to click on it, which over the course of a day can be a real time savor. It was also used to display the current status of the web page in question -- what percentage of it was loaded, how many images were left, etc.
In short, it was a good thing for geeks like me.
But unfortunately, Microsoft apparently decided that was just a little too much information for the average user, and disabled it. Now I can turn it back on again, but for reasons I don't fully understand, it won't stay turned on. When I close out of IE 6, the status bar disappears. So the next time I launch IE, I have to bring it back up again. Arrrgh.
And people wonder why Firefox is my primary browser.
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