I was watching Jacq use the internet the other day. ‘watching ‘ as in waiting for the coffee machine and vaguely looking in her direction. She wanted to get to somewhere so she cleared the address bar of the browser and typed the search term (it was not a site she had been to, no ‘awesome bar’ action here) and hit Enter. The search results came up and off she went. Later I saw her use the Google search box in Firefox which of course gets the same result. And a few days after this I saw her go to Google.co.uk but then use the Firefox search box to get a search result even though Google was right there in front of her. I did ask why she did not just type in that Google box, or why she uses the address bar, or use Google and she couldn’t answer – but she knew she was right because she always got there to where she wanted. It’s not even that she is taking longer or having to click so many more times. She cannot explain why she does but she also cannot change. I suppose the way she sees it she has options and she will use those as she sees fit. Which is fine even though it looks very odd indeed.

And one reason why she would hate OS X? One icon at the bottom. She likes windows. This new Tab Candy for FF4 might be all groovy (I imagine it will kill old machines) but the single dock icon would be a major reason for her to hate the mac. She knows all about tabs but she keeps tabs in windows – strange she gets that far with the search bit – so it looks like Ubuntu will slide onto her laptop (which I am really liking on the netbook. It is very nice indeed so far).