OK, First world, whiny bitch time. I'm worse than an out of touch, entitled, suburban house wife. I'm a sometimes wanabe, out of touch, entitled, suburban house wife. Just call me Karen. Go figure. Here goes anyway. See ya on the other side.

I'm frustrated by websites that go out of their way to grant me the dubious opportunity to install yet another silly "app". It seems a universal law that these apps will have much worse user experience than the web page the app is designed to replace. At a minimum it will not be resizable, it will be missing key features such as on page search, spell check, font selections, customization and often more. There will be no facility at all to support deep links or book marks. Generally I find apps to be a much worse experience than using the web page directly. Yet the owners of the website are so enamored with their pretty little app that they keep sending popups asking if I want to install their wonderful app. Why don't I install their app. Did you notice we now have an app? Just install this app. Why have you not installed out app yet? The insistence that I install their wonderful app is the worst part. No! I don't want your app. If you keep asking me to install your app I'm going to stop patronizing your services. This is the last time you are going to hear form this Karen. Thank you very much.

Second to phone apps are phone specific web pages. Often these have similar shortcomings to apps. I have to say that when done well mobile web pages can be good. There are some stellar examples. By and large the are dismal, poorly maintained, redheaded stepchildren of the main page. I still get my browser features that me and my maturing wanabe house wife eyes need so much. On page search, resize, copy-n-paste. You know the list.

Finally are the app in a webpage, Web 2.0, web 3.0, microservice, browser side code javascript hell holes. Load one of these and kiss your browser performance good bye. It does not seem to matter what browser, what oss, how many cores, how much ram., how fast a network that microservice, websocket, push techology, "desk top experience" website will eat it all up and leave me crying to the support tech at my ISP. Her name is Dot. I know because we talk so often. I think they route me to her on purpose. She nods in all the right places while I tell my sad tale of poor performing web pages I have to use to get my job done then tells me to reboot my router which I have to hang up to do since my phone service goes over our wifi. Maybe Dot is just a tape recording. Function key 8 on the tech support web app they have to use to get their job done.

I really hate computers. Honestly, I do. There are times that I wish that we were back in the times when "computer" was a job title. Usually a woman with a masters or PhD in math or some engineering discipline. She spent all day with a grid note book, a Boroughs hand crank adding machine, and a slide rule. All day working out sums and integrals and interpolations for fill rates and slump volumes for road grades and aircraft seating loads. But no. We had to invent a misbegotten electronic confuser filled to the brim with zeros and ones. And we replaced her with it. Her job title was forgotten. So much so that her job title is given over to this spawn of Satan that I'm using to post this note. Oh well. I'm not very good at trapezoidal interpolation, and numeric differentiation anyway.

Are you old enough to remember 1999? Do you remember when we called the browser a "thin client"? Do you remember pre Web 1.0? Those were the days. Back in those days you could put up a half dozen static html pages, drop a script or two in the cgi-bin directory and make people happy with pretty pictures on their screen. Yes those were the days. But yesterday's solution is always tomorrows problem and more people wanted more form their computers. The blog was invented and teenage techno-geeks started writing about round corners and css and javascript and applets. It was all down hill since then. Maybe it's been down hill since before then. Maybe it's been down hill since all the way back to the time when some cave woman complained about her caveman banging rocks together.

OK. That's it. I'm done. Call me Karen if you must. I deserve it. Mine are indeed the finest of first world problems. I'm grateful that these are the problems I have rather than the ones problems many of you have. I'm glad these are my problems rather than those that others of us around this globe have. No one wants to kick me out of school for having a vagina. No one wants to stuff my face into a curb stone because my complexion is too dark. I know where I will be sleeping tonight and I know what I'll be having for breakfast. For all that, I thank providence, and I try to pay forward what I can. Still I hate how so many of us choose to complicate these silly information services just so that they can remain in the global 1% along with me.

Oh for the good old days of Web 1.0 when browsers were thin, Smash Mouth was on the top of the charts and every tech-nerd with a computer was going to go big with an IPO.