This is the nerdy internet edition of TTAMCNTTWB

1. Favicons.  For those of you who don’t know, favicon is that little image at the top of the browser, next to the name of the website.  It’s the tiny purple “f” on the Facebook site, the peace sign on Craigslist, the red “M” envelope on Gmail.  They’re called favicons because they are icons that show up on your Favorites list, obviously.  Favicons used to be a great idea, terribly executed.  Originally they were .ico files, which were specially designed by Microsoft.  Which meant that you had to make the icon with some Microsoft Icon Maker program, which meant that a lot of sites didn’t have favicons because they didn’t want to use Microsoft’s stupid program.  Also, there was no HTML support for favicons; originally you just put them in the root directory of your website and, I guess, the browser was supposed to say, “Hey, that’s a favicon!  Woo!” and save it for you.  This led to lots of inconsistencies.  Sometimes a favicon would work on my bookmarks, sometimes it wouldn’t.  Other times, I would have the wrong favicon for a certain site, or multiple sites would use the same favicon, which was the wrong one.

But now … now favicons have W3C support, and their own little bit of HTML, and they sit and stay perfectly on your browser, which means I can move on to my next point:

2. Bookmark Toolbars.  Now that favicons work so well, I don’t need to label my bookmarks in the bookmark toolbar anymore!  I can just have the icon sit there, instantly telling me which site is which.  This means that I can put twice, if not three times as many bookmarks on the toolbar, saving me, oh, about two seconds of navigation time, which is silly but still pretty awesome.  Another thing that helps me with this new awesomeness is

3. Better ALT tags!  ALT tags are the little popups that show up when you hover over a link, or an image, or a bookmark.  These used to suck.  I won’t go into detail, but just take it from me when I say they used to suck.  They were poorly supported, and sometimes were just worthless.  But now, if I forget what a particular bookmark is on my toolbar, I can hover over it and it’ll show me the URL, and I’ll instantly remember.  Thanks, ALT tags!

4. RSS feeds.  Again, another thing that was implemented before people really understood how awesome it is.  RSS feeds are like newspaper articles, and you’re building your own newspaper.  You pick and choose what you want to read, and set it up through RSS feeds.  Google, as always, has an excellent application called Google Reader which handles RSS feeds so well, you won’t need anything else.  And if you use Blogger to blog, the blogs that you follow show up on Google Reader automatically.  It’s almost magic.

5. Email.  Email used to suck compared to IMing.  But now both are integrated and everything is awesome.  That’s all I have to say about that, I just wanted to have five items instead of four.

Now, if only Torrents could be as cool as these things are now, the world would be a better place.  Someday, Torrents … someday.