The Cult of the Cool Mac: Made with 100% USDA real meat!

Web 2.0 is supposed to stand for the convergence of the desktop computer and the Internet where your files and your favorite editor are available at any time on any kind of Internet-savvy device, but there's a huge difference between the idea of Web 2.0 and what marketers call Web 2.0.

What marketers promote as "Web 2.0" (I'll use quotes to distinguish faux Web 2.0) is a toolkit rather than an operating system or application. It amounts to a database of flashy code and a bunch of scripts that people can plug strings into. Since the toolkit is known as "Web 2.0," people think that anything made with the toolkit is Web 2.0 -- and that's BS. It's like saying that a wheel and an axle are the same as a Lamborghini. But people buy it.

Next, web designers pick up the phrase and use it as a big ticket item that they can use to make a little extra money off of a job. They say, "yeah, that's a good site design, but it won't be bleeding edge until we WEB-TOO-POINT-OH it!

The goal of a real Web 2.0 site is to make navigation and interaction familiar and easy for a user. The goal of "Web 2.0" for a web designer is to pile on as many tangled lines of code as possible so that it looks like a lot of work was done and so that it would take hours for an outsider to work through that mess to find out exactly how incompetent he really is at coding a site.

From a development standpoint "Web 2.0" effectively means that you use JavaScript to make a site where lots of stuff pops up to block other stuff with no regard for whether popping up actually facilitates anything in order to make sure that it's as difficult as possible for the visitor to your web site to get any useful information whatsoever.

Thus did driving away visitors become the defining characteristic of a cutting-edge site.

In the name of "Web 2.0," Yahoo took their simple and easily-comprehended tv listings site and made it into a pile of steaming crap.

Now Google did the same to their image search.

Anyway, getting past my rant, I'll tell you that there IS a way to make a Google image search produce useful results.

The useful version of the Google Images site loads if you don't have JavaScript enabled. The trick, therefore, is to disable JavaScript just for that site.

This story at the Unofficial Google Blog describes how to access the Java-free version of the site whenever you visit it. In case their instructions for Firefox on the Mac aren't clear, here's how to do it:

In TextEdit (or any text editor), create a new file containing these lines of code...

user_pref("capability.policy.policynames", "nojs");
user_pref("capability.policy.nojs.sites", "http://images.google.com");
user_pref("capability.policy.nojs.javascript.enabled", "noAccess");

Save the file with the name "user.js" and put the file in the folder that you find in the ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/ folder.

Then quit and relaunch Firefox. From that point on, JavaScript will be disabled on Google Images web pages and you'll see the useful version of the site again.

Before and after restoring the classic Google Images results

Update: MacOSXHints.com now has a hint about this issue. The comments include tips for disabling JavaScript for the image search in a few different browsers, including Omniweb, Camino and Opera. They also mention a few plug-ins/Add-Ons that can do the job.

Updated by Andrew, February 4, 2007, 08:33 AM