There is nothing I hate more than waiting in line. It’s excruciating!

So, I was quite pleased to see that my local Acme supermarket has ust added a nice twist — TVs in the checkout line! It’s a win-win too, because I’m sure Acme makes money selling advertising space on the little show it plays (think “The 20″ at the movies).

Acme was once the laughing stock of the local supermarket scene, but store renovations including self-checkout, healthy/gourmet sections and now in line TV has made me really miss having one on the way home from work. Now that’s customer service!

I’ve noticed recently that many of the networks are leading the commercial breaks with a movie preview. Most people, it is not crazy to assume, are far more interested in seeing an ad for the next summer blockbuster than a minivan ad. It’s a subtle move, but it draws the watcher into the commercial break, and postpones the inevitable reach for the TiVo remote. Personally, I’ve even ended up watching an extra commercial or two because of this tactic.

I have no proof that this is being done intentionally, but it certainly makes sense, and seems to be working.

Ok, so maybe I can’t really claim anything is the “Top” Firefox extension, because I surely haven’t seen them all… but here are two that I’ve been turned on to recently:

IETab: Allows you to open IE-only sites (that don’t work or crash in FFox) in a new tab. I assume it basically uses IE in the FFox interface. You won’t believe how quickly you’ll use it! (Only works on Windows with IE 4+.)

Tab Mix Plus: This has a lot of tab-related features, but the real boon for me is that you can set it up to open new window links (target=_blank) in new tabs. If you like, you can open all popups in tabs as well. This is tabbed browsing at its finest!

Allmusic is a great site — it catalogs pretty much every musical artist, album and song ever released and reviews an enormous amount of them. A few years ago, however, they redesigned the site in a pretty questionable way, adding clicks in most places to get to content, moving important content off the main artist pages, and adding a login that didn’t remember where you were on the site (it took you to the homepage and the login didn’t stick through the back button). All that being said, a recent release takes the poor UI design to the next level. Check out their new search box:

Without really thinking, I typed in a query, selected “Song” on the dropdown box, and clicked on the “Advanced Search” button. Did I want to go to the advanced search page? Of course not! And, because I, like most web readers, don’t really bother to actually read most text, I didn’t even realize that I hadn’t performed a search. I just thought it had no results, so I went back and tried another search. Eventually, of course, I realized that this interface is just incredibly confusing.