Conspiracy Theories...

I have been wooed away from Thunderbird as my preferred email retrieval system by Google Mail, mostly because of the marked reduction in spam emails.  Strange to tell, I'm not interested in purchasing supplies of Viagra, having a penis extension, or giving my bank details to a rich businessman's widow in Nigeria in order to earn myself a a few hundred thousand pounds...

I have occasionally pondered whether Google itself is sending out all the spam emails, and then making sure that they don't get through Google's filters... so that everyone will eventually switch to Google...

Paranoid?  Moi?

I read Fr. Tim's post on how wonderful Google Chrome was, and decided to have a little play with it.  I wasn't completely happy with it... I guess I'm quite resistant to change... but I didn't really "take" to the new look, or to the tabs being way up top, or to the fact that a page can only be bookmarked under one set of bookmarks, rather than, as with Firefox, as many times as you want it...  small things, nothing earth-shattering, but enough...

In the meantime, the new version of Firefox appears to have installed itself on my computer.  I'm not entirely sure how it did this, as I tried to block it the last time I received an "Install Update?" query box...  Since then, Firefox has been playing silly beggars.  The bookmarks won't complete loading, and so it gets very slow trying to click on a link or a com-box.  In the old version of Firefox, I could just close the whole thing down by clicking on the close "X" at the top, and then re-open the browser.  Now, when I try to re-open the browser, I get a little box telling me that Firefox is open, but not responding, and I need to restart my computer.  However, the Google Chrome icon is working perfectly well, with a very fast connection and upload speed...

Is Firefox in cahoots with Google, making the system so annoyingly problematic that people turn to Chrome out of sheer exasperation??

... just a thought...