Alternative title: How to turn what Works As Expected into an aggravation
So we all know that Firefox brought tabbing to the masses, right? And users love it, or so we're told. Well, it's not a lie; for the most part, I don't hate it. Or at least until a few months ago, I found no reason to. Then came Firefox 2. You see, I like to enable the setting "Always show the tab bar", because I use both tabs and multiple windows a lot (a window is a thematic group of tabs), and I don't like the jumpiness caused by the tab bar appearing or disappearing. I like things to stay in place. And that works fine and dandy. Except that in Firefox 2, "Always show the tab bar" apparently means "even if you have to rescue the browser window from destruction to ensure that the tab bar can continue to shine in all its glory." That is, the Ctrl-W shortcut now has the same demented behaviour that the close-tab button always had: when there's only one tab left, Ctrl-W closes the tab AND THEN OPENS A NEW ONE WITH THE HOMEPAGE!! RAAAAHHH! DIE!! Die, dammit, and get outta my face! Really, it's very hard to excite me past my usual "grumpy crank" level of annoyance, but the past couple of months, even though I only used Firefox 2 lightly (my main machine is still at 1.5.x), the frustration caused by this deranged behaviour has driven me batty. You might say it could be justified on the grounds that it aligns the behaviour of Ctrl-W with the close-tab button. And I agree that making similar gestures behave similarly is a good UI principle, who DOESN'T want closing the last tab to go away?? Who ever preferred the close-tab button's behaviour? If there really is such a clientele, this NEEDS to be configurable. Yes I know preferences are costly. I don't advocate their willy- nilly addition either. But turning off the "Always show the tab bar" setting CAUSES CTRL-W TO ALSO CLOSE THE WINDOW WHEN YOU CLOSE THE LAST TAB. !!@)@*#&&!^!&!&!!!!!!! What dimwit ever thought that conflating these options in a single preference in this manner was a sane thing to do!? It took me AGES to realise why the damn Ctrl-W shortcut no longer worked as I expected it to. Googling for close to two hours or so in total turned up no solution, but did turn up the hint that A COMPLETELY UNRELATED-SEEMING OPTION controlled this behaviour. So I finally caved and turned off the "Always show the tab bar" option in order to regain my sanity, even though now I have to live with jumpy window content that keeps jarring me out. Good grief, Mozilla people. Way to completely arbitrarily make a nuisance out of something dead simple AFTER YOU HAD ALREADY GOTTEN IT RIGHT. Thanks a whole steaming heap, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
