The more computers change and improve, the more they don’t improve the overall (non-geek) user experience.

Yes, I could write until I ran out of disc space about this, but my latest hiccup was one that was good but ungood.

I’ve been using FireFox, and they just came out with an alert for a critical patch. OK.

I tried installing it, and it just wouldn’t take. No message, just a spinning graphic with “downloading and installing patch” message.

OK – be patient. Take shower.

Still spinning. WTF?

I went to /. to see if others have been having this problem, and I got the anwer: I have to enable web site downloads (on a per site basic) through FireFox preferences.

While this is a good thing – block trojans and so on – it’s not intuitive. And the installer message never said (even after a half-hour [shower] of trying), “uh, dude, must allow installs or I can’t help ya…”

Once I enabled downloads for the site, the install took about < 5 seconds. Again, excellent. But this is not a good user experience, overall. Most people would just give up and say, “This browser is hosed – it tells me to install this patch but it won’t install. Back to IE..” Which would be a bad thing…