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Firefox News Roundup
Spaceman40 sent in this ZDNet story. PeterPumpkin collects way too many links to Firefox stories: "According to SpreadFirefox.com , there were almost 3 million downloads of Firefox 1.0 in the 5 days since launch, which comes to over 500,000 downloads per day. There are news bites coming out about Firefox everywhere you could possibly imagine. According to a report on MozillaZine, Denmark's largest television channel, TV2, reported on the release of Mozilla Firefox 1.0. PC-WELT, the German equivalent of PC-World, is distributing their own customised version of Firefox to customers." Thomas Hawk writes "Rather than go outside for the past 48 hours, Scott Granneman prefers to burrow in his den and come up with one of the first definitive lists of Firefox links. Good geeking Scott. And way to overcompensate."
It should be NEW. This is OLDs.
I've been a happy w3m/Omniweb/Safari user for some years now, but I really want to like Mozilla and its children. It's such the darling of the open-source development community that every few years I think that they must have finally ironed out all the very simple and severe bugs that I've seen in the past, and give it another shot. Sadly, this release has proven to be as disappointing as the others:
- Mousewheel scrolling works in some places, but not in preferences windows
- Selecting some preferences options changes the contents of the current sheet, some others close the current one and open a new sheet, and at least one (Advanced Javascript settings) opens a violently nonstandard window with no titlebar or other decorations.
- Popup menus are incredibly inconsistent not only with the OS, but even with each other. For example, the popup menu for selecting a default destination for downloads draws hideously all over itself, ending up about twice its proper size. And when clicked, it displays a thing which is not a popup menu, but instead some nonstandard device which is hard-coded to aqua-esque colors and fonts, completely ignoring my actual system settings. Similarly, the faked popup menus for font selection employ a completely nonstandard (and awful) mechanism of scrollbars within the menu, rather than a menu that just scrolls for you as you reach beyond the edge of what's currently displayed.
- Similarly, system widgets aren't used even for in-page items like radio buttons, checkboxes, buttons, text fields. I cannot fathom the hubris that makes the Mozilla developers feel that their application is so uniquely important that it deserves to look different than every other application on my system.
- There's still no standard gui-accessible way to do something so basic as disabling gif animation. You can get to it through about:config, if you're willing to either wade through several thousand cryptically named options to find it, or happen to know that it's called image.animation_mode. Of course, once you've found it, your reward is to try and figure out how to change it correctly. It's not clear whether you want to change the "Status" or "Value", or what settings would be valid for either. (It turns out, of course, that you can only change "Value", not "Status". I had foolishly assumed at first that when I right-clicked on the "Value" and selected "Modify", that it would modify what I had selected, not some adjacent thing.)
Being able to disable gif animations is what made IE better than Netscape in 1997, and was the one and only thing I added when I got the source Netscape 4. I'm saddened to see that even after this many years of open development, Mozilla has fundamentally still not caught up to every other browser in existence.
- Similarly, not having any builtin way to filter banner ads and such is pretty terrible. I started regularly filtering banner ads before they even became standard, so I've pretty much never used the web with them. On the rare occasion when I use a tool such as this, I'm horrified to see how infested civilized-seeming sites are.
Sure, you can whip up a stylesheet that attempts to block many of them, or play games with proxies. But these days I'd really expect a browser to not only take care of such things for me, but to default to doing so without any intervention on my part at all.
- Lastly... ohmygod is it slow. I haven't seen it take this long to launch a browser since Netscape 1.0. Even worse, it appears to want to make me feel as if it's faster by drawing a window toward the beginning of the half-minute ordeal of starting it up. Unfortunately, it doesn't actually do anything, respond to any input, even draw any menus until several aeons later, so the pretense of being usable is pretty flimsy.
So I guess I'll head back to the array of browsers that actually work well, and resume hoping that someday Mozilla will join the party.