This was based on my personal experience and my personal preference – I think your average user appreciates being able to easily identify a text box, a form button etc. – as forms can be confronting beasts to some people. If you leave all the form controls in their default style in the users chosen browser then at least they can readily and quickly identify and understand them.

This is always something that the designer in me (and designers and other colleagues I work with) naturally (and usually subconsciously, on my part) fight. Quite often I end up styling form controls (buttons especially) in my design mock-ups and by that point it’s harder to let go of them.

I have in the past on numerous occasions thought "I wish that all browsers would allow me to do whatever I want with form controls" but that thought soon passed when I thought about some of the hideous monstrosities that would allow people to create, I’d never even contemplated the why and how it would be implemented by the browser or in CSS. Eric Meyer, on the other hand, has thought about it. It’s a very long post but defiantly a worthwhile read if this is something you’ve ever had to face.

Although it’s not perfect for my requirements until today I thought the only downfall with it was the fact that I can’t integrate the bookmarks into Firefox better, I’m talking a sidebar that acts like my del.icio.us homepage and lets me type in the tags to filter those.

But this evening I started using del.icio.us to look for some popular font sites, I’ve not really done much searching on del.icio.us so far and I don’t think I will again for some time either.

The problem I have is, to say that the concept of the del.icio.us search is to find the most popular pages with a given tag, its incredibly hard for me to tell how popular something is and it even hurts my eyes a little to look at the results.

You see I’m colour blind, quite badly colour blind in fact, and in the del.icio.us search results:

…I can’t read how many people have saved the link as the text clashes awfully against all but the lightest shades of the background colour they have chosen to use – on the darker shades it makes my eyes hurt trying to look at it.

I can’t think of a worse combination I’ve come across when using a website, or in any situation come to think of it. Maybe dark red on black comes close, but at least that doesn’t hurt my eyes and is usually on really poorly designed sites anyway.

I give up and try IE, this time next to the pause & play buttons I have some text which says "transitioning", which is nice and vauge. I wait a minute or so until the audio starts – hooray, who knew flash 7 player had cross-browser issues.

But my triumphant dance didn’t last long, after the first couple of bars I had to stop the track. I don’t know what quality encoding it is at but it sounded worse than 92kps, you know when you get that tinny recorded in a bath feeling on every cymbal hit. I’m a huge System fan and there is no way I’m listening to their new album for the first time at phone quality.

With a little hope in my heart that the preview has received better handling over at MTV.com I try that. It’s not to be found anywhere on the home page and I get distracted by something else, a video for the new Thrice single "Image of the Invisible", which I click to watch that instead.

MTV really don’t like me today do they, I get their advert/introduction and then nothing. I press play again on the embedded Media Player and I get the watch the advert/introduction again, but still no video.

So I decide to try watch it on launch, I’ll compress my experience on launch to bullet points:

• Find Video, click to watch.
• Receive error message: "To use this application with Netscape, you must use a 4.7x or 7.1 version.". Well I’m pretty certain that Firefox 1.0.7 is better than Netscape 7.1 and a lot better than 4.7x.
• Try IE.
• Find Video, click to watch.
• Receive error message: "This video is not available in your area. Please choose another video or visit your local Yahoo! UK & Ireland music service".
• Try to think if I’ve ever managed to watch a video on launch.
• Vow never to use launch again.

Now I’d quite like to check out the new Thrice stuff as I don’t listen to radio (not that there is any good rock radio in the UK) and don’t get chance to watch music television anymore. So I check out the official Thrice website, sure enough there is 3 links for the video in different formats on the homepage. Again I’ll compress my experience to bullet points:

• Choose Quicktime.
• Receive message that Quicktime needs to install something (which it then can’t find) to play the content, and only get the audio.
• Choose Media Player.
• Receive message: "You must be a member of Thrice.net to watch the full-length version… To watch 30 seconds, select below."
• Give it up as a bad job.

So tonight I learnt that I might be interested in the new albums from Thrice & System of a Down, but got no idea as to the quality of the content of the albums via the official record industry provided routes.

The music industry sure is working hard to make sure people don’t go to those pesky P2P networks with their reliable downloads at high quality.

The fact that I am going to buy the new System album no matter what does not enter into this, the bottom line is that music fans should not have to accept this poor treatment. If I had been in two minds about whether to get the new System album or not then the shoddy quality of the preview would not have swayed me towards a purchase.