What Happened to the Internet Control Panel
I think I’m a pretty smart guy, but I went to go and change the default email on my iBook. I went to System Preferences and looked for the Internet and it wasn’t there. There was Dot Mac and Network, but not Internet.
One of the things that people appreciated about Mac Oh Esses 8 and 9 was the Internet control panel, a resource that Windows copied; it was a one stop repository for setting all of your internet defaults. There was even a freeware, 3rd party version, that offered you a way to set your Finger profile (even after the Finger protocol was supplanted by the home page). It was great.
Now, you only have one place to set your default mail, and that is Apple Mail. The only place you can set your default browser is Safari. Does anyone else see this as freaking… off? I don’t know about your default RSS or Usenet news reader, but I suspect if Apple had a standalone client for these, they would also set these resources at the system level.
It is important for users to have choices. I understand that as Apple becomes more and more capable at producing software more and more third party sources become marginalized or dry up entirely. However, the reason I am changing email clients on the iBook is that I have a project going in MS Entourage, which Mail doesn’t support. I know IE is gone, but you can still get it from colleagues or you can get Firefox or Opera if you want to use an extra or alternate browser. Fortunately, I know Firefox can check for its default status in its general prefs, and so can Opera, but this is not intuitive.
There should be a tab for this in the Network Prefs Panel if not a discrete Internet control panel. They couild even set this up in the Accounts Prefs Panel for each separate user. What a concept.
It also hurts Apple, who has shown an incredible (for them) regard for open standards. I know that Mac OS puts everything you need on the drive for internet access, but some people would like to toss Safari and Mail, and use Firefox and Thunderbird. Setting the prefs in Mail and Safari is like shooting themselves in the foot. People who don’t like Apple or the Mac might think it monopolistic.
Filed under: Software
