So...
in a fit of enthusiasm I thought "Golly, that Firefox. A new release,
the third major version. Maybe things have gotten less awful since last
time I tried it."
After all, Opera has plenty to hate, and some of the features of Firefox
are kind of nice -- especially the ones where someone else does the
heavy work of blocking ads, or fixing broken websites.
So, hey, I think. Install it. Try it out. Who knows? Some tens of
megabytes later I fire it up and think, hey, let me start.
It wasn't actually hard to find the configuration to turn off cookies
globally. There was even an "exceptions" button next to it where I
could allow them for the few sites that both demand them /and/ are
necessary to visit.
Great. Except, know what? The only way to enable them is through the
preferences dialog. Menu, menu item, dialog, tab-like icon, button,
manual data entry, button, button, button.
Good call. Because the idea that I might want this to be convenient is
kind of dumb, eh? Who would want to control that sort of thing quickly.
On the way to discovering this I poked around the menus a bit. My first
port of call was the context menu for the page because, you know, Opera
puts "edit site preferences" there where I can manage all the site
specific junk.
Nothing like it. Oh, a bunch of random crap in random order. Why is
there a menu item to undo closing a tab on my context menu? Do I care?
Why are there random addenda at the end, some with lines between and
some without, most of which seem redundant to each other? Who comes up
with this crap?
Anyway, being foolish ^W brave I soldiered on. Turn on cookies
everywhere, and live with that, I guess. Now to a touch of UI help.
I have a widescreen monitor -- you can't really avoid them in laptops
these days and, to my surprise, I don't actually /hate/ it as such.
It makes it easy for me to have a bunch of navigation and informational
gumph like tabs on the left and right edges of the screen, then put the
content in the middle with a bit more vertical space and less
distraction. I like that.
So, I think, I will just customize the location of the tab bar -- you
know, stick it on the right, nice and wide, so I can see the half dozen
things I have open on the occasions that I end up like that.
Nope. Not possible. Can't move it, can't really do anything to it. So,
I think, "extensions". I /should/ have given up, but no, apparently I
do like pain.
Sadly, while there are a dozen random extensions that display naked
ladies, check the cricket scores, or otherwise speed the heat death of
the universe by wasting energy on useless computation, nothing even
vaguely /useful/ is done by them.
I did find a few things that looked promising though. A keybinding
configuration extension, for example. That sounds dreadful, because the
idea that I can't change key bindings without installing random code
from some underfed monkey is bad, but hey, this /is/ Firefox.
Turns out that I am not even that lucky. I don't know how awful the
extension is because it isn't compatible with the current version of
Firefox.
It worked fine up until 3.0 alpha 5, apparently, but the changes between
that and release candidate one are sufficiently large to break it
completely.
Nothing inspires confidence like the knowledge that the next security
fix is probably also going to break the widget and get rid of my custom
key bindings. What joy.
I also noted, at this time, that despite being the old thing running on
my laptop performance wasn't quite ... snappy. That was a surprise,
really, because this is a dual core, 2.6GHz machine with 4GB of RAM.
Seriously. How can you be slow with that much space to play with?
Anyway, that was the end. I gave up. Firefox, with random popup
windows full of extension configuration and shite performance without an
excuse have put an end to my patience.
I will live with Opera being randomly broken and impossible to extend
myself, because it lets me do sane things, sanely, and quickly.
Gah!
Daniel
I would say that I wait to see what the open WebKit engine does, but the
answer is going to be something to do with the KDE web browser, and
Firefox is more attractive than suffering that again.
--
X Windows is the Iran-Contra of graphical user interfaces: a tragedy of
political compromises, entangled alliances, marketing hype, and just plain
greed. X Windows is to memory as Ronald Reagan was to money.
-- The Unix Haters Handbook
