Okay, so I prefer Google. To the point that I really don't care about the other search providers.... I don't care that bing found a few people who prefer their search to google, the name just reminds me of Chandler Bing from friends. And I think his name was meant to be weird, obscure, boring, and sort of "huh"ish. No offense to any people out their with one of their names being Bing, it just wasn't meant to be the name of a search engine. Especially when Google is already a verb.
Moving on, I had to dump windoze 8 "metro" (I hear they wanted to call it something else, but whatever they tried to officially change it to, I'm sure is still dumb) for a Classic Shell so that I can have a usable experience. Not that I love windows, and as soon as Linux Steam gains enough steam, I'll dump windoze forever (hopefully). But for now, I'm using windoze 8 on my newest computer, because I could get it for $40 by upgrading one of my XP licenses, which I have a few, and $40 is less than I could have gotten windoze 7 for. And I can feel good about using a legal copy of windows.
I really hate the magic tiles they think I'll want, but I don't intrinsically hate the tiles. The real problem is I still can't do 90% of the things I want to do with the metro UI. It feels like instead of having an intelligent desktop that I can keep a bunch of things open at once and refer back and forth, I'm supposed to turn my computer into a smartphone and do one thing at a time.
When I want to do one thing at a time, I might do it on a mobile device. When I want to get serious, I get to the keyboard/mouse combo, and don't want to play smartphone.
So, the main reason I hate windows 8 is that it fails to be as good as previous user interfaces (7, XP) because certain central elements are gone, and the replacements are terrible.
Oh yeah, and now I'm to the whole reason that I came to this breaking point to write this: user agent.
I had to copy the user agent from my windows 7 machine and put it into my firefox about:config so stupid google will stop asking me if I want to add google to my metro menu (which I'm not using, because it sucks). So every time I open a browser and go to my home page (google) I'm reminded that I hate windows 8 and metro. Because I'd much rather use something stock because periodically Classic Shell kind of stutters for a couple seconds. Not that I can really tell if it's a classic shell problem, or a windows 8 problem, or some weird configuration issue with my hardware, because I didn't buy windows 7 (as would have been the preferable experience, but as previously stated, costs more, legally).
Anyway, to change this go into about:config and type "useragent" into the search bar, and there probably won't be this listed:
general.useragent.override
so add it as string, and this is the windows 7 string:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:19.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/19.0
The only difference is that windows 8 = NT 6.2 and windows 7 = NT 6.1 so this is how you can tell people, stop annoying me about the stupid metro UI because it sucks, and I should just use linux since I like it better anyway. That is all.
