In the days of yore, when Extension Conflicts (kind of like DLL hell on Windows, except solveable) ruled the Mac troubleshooting landscape (this was a decade ago), Ted Landau’s MacFixIt site was a must-read. He had the dish on every OS upgrade, troubleshooting tips, and how to do preventive maintenance that made a Mac pre-OS X still more stable than the Windows available at the time.

Cometh OS X, and suddenly a whole new technology resides under the hood. MacFixIt struggled to keep up, as the voodoo of System 7 yielded to the exposed underpinnings of BSD-style Unix. The site expanded but kept with troubleshooting via the post-hoc fallacy. I kept with them for a while (I’ve been using flavors of OS X for seven or more years), but the site has degenerated into uselessness. Witness the following:

Google’s Gmail service has increased its coolness factor considerably by adding IMAP access, but meanwhile, back in the world of Web mail access, one user complains that the initial Gmail Web page has trouble loading under Leopard. He says that there are difficulties no matter what browser he uses.

One user.

And a website is slow in every browser, so it must be Leopard, right?!

Um. I’ve been using this here web thing for a while now, and one of the first things you learn is that a) not every server responds equally well, b) sometimes your internet connection is slow, and c) even when a) and b) aren’t true, there can be breakdowns between you and the server you’re trying to reach.

To raise this as a serious question about OS X 10.5 while admitting you can’t reproduce the problem and not entertaining any other of a host of more likely possibilities means that MacFixIt is being dumped from my RSS feeds (I dropped bookmarks long ago).

Sorry, Ted. I can get real problems reported by other, less Cassandraesque sources, and don’t have to waste time with inane guesswork subsituting for a little education. I can do that myself without assistance, and reading about web application slowdowns that don’t even have a plausible mechanism in the OS is taking away from my valuable TV-watching, eyebrow-plucking, or even just staring-at-the-wall-blankly time. Those are all more worthwhile pursuits than the above article.