The other day, I was reading a web page, and something strange happened. Without warning, a woman in a red uniform appeared, and started pushing things about. “This is it,” I thought, “I’ve cracked. The walls of reality are coming tumbling down.” However, it turned out that I wasn’t, in fact, going mad, but was instead experiencing something I’d been deprived of for quite a few years now; animated banner advertising.
The reason for this brief psychodrama was that I was trying out Google Chrome. My general impressions of it are almost universally positive, but I switched back to Firefox because of something I didn’t expect: lock-in, where the way a piece of software works makes it difficult or impossible to move to an alternative. Usually, lock-in is something associated with proprietary software and formats, MS Word being a typical example. Firefox and Chrome are both open source, and deal in the open standards that make up the web, so what’s going on?
