Saturday February 19, 2005

Notes from the Left

I recently bought a new laptop, an Averatec C3500 convertible, which functions as both a laptop and a Tablet PC. Because I’m a big geek? No dummies, because I’m a professional assassin, like Tom Cruise in Collateral.

Immediately, however, the thing created problems for my left-handed lifestyle, to which I remain very committed. (Left-handedness being a v. common trait in professional assassins, at least the successful ones.) The problem is that while many Tablet PC programs allow you to switch side menus to the left, browser scrollbars always appear on the right. As a left-handed hitman, this means I have to obscure the whole screen just to scroll down on a webpage. Not good.

No problem, I thought, I use Firefox — the most utterly customizable, radically transcendent and completely revolutionary software ever created. Unfortunately, it seems you can’t move the scrollbar to the left in Firefox. Some wags in the Firefox forums even scoffed at the idea. Apparently, left-handedness isn’t W3C compliant.

Luckily, I was able to find a hack for Internet Explorer at TabletPCBuzz.com. What’s wrong with this picture? Note to Firefox developers: Let’s spend less time working on the Abe Vigoda gags and more time building a browser people can, you know, use.