Fixing Firefox
I’ve been eagerly testing the various betas of Firefox 2.0 to see if it fixes some of my personal pet peeves. So far it looks like I’m going to have to start voting for or opening new bugs on these subjects:
Slow page loading and rendering on the Mac with many windows open.
This presents the spinning beach ball of death and blocks me from going to other windows. Safari can load the same pages from the same sites at the same time on the same Mac like lightning, so it’s not a server side problem.
Possibly it’s related to opening them with AppleScript, especially when one of the intermediate pages puts up Firefox’s “Please enter the master password for the Software Security Device” dialog:
It also likes to spin for a while when I “View Selection Source” and then select some of the text in the view-source window. This one’s sporadic. I’d say it only happens about half the time.
Too Many Cookie Questions
You can tell Firefox to block all third party cookies, or you can tell it to ask you whether and how long to keep each individual cookie; but you can’t tell it to block all third party cookies and ask you for every first party cookie. You’d think this preference combination would do it, but it doesn’t:
Instead this setup ignores the preference to block all third party cookies, and asks you for each and every cookie: first and third party.
Not every phrase containing a period is a domain name
Searches performed from the location bar should not assume anything containing a period is a domain name and anything with a colon is a URL. Certainly if I type java.net.URL into the location bar and hit return, it’s OK to try to resolve that as a domain name. However, when that fails Firefox should load http://www.google.com/search?btnG=Google+Search&q=java.net.URL, just like it does if I only type url.
Embedded Media
Why do QuickTime movies not appear until I scroll the screen? Then disappear if I scroll it again? Ditto for Flash?
Bottom Scrolling with Page Down
When I read a several page article such as this Mark Stephens piece I hit the page down key several times when I hit the end of a page to get to the next batch of content. This works great. I hit page down and then commence reading back at the top of the screen, except on the last page. Because the very last text rarely fills exactly one page, I then have to scan down to somewhere from 10-90% of the way down the page until I find where I left off reading at the end of the previous page.
I would like Firefox to always scroll a full page down (where page is defined as the current height of the content pane) when I hit the page down key, even if that means it has to leave blank space at the bottom.
Back Button
Speaking of scrolling, when I use the back button, I should go back to where I was on the page, not to the top of the page, from where I have to scroll back to where I started.
Improved Selection
I really wish Firefox was better at selecting text. For instance I’d like to be able to select three consecutive paragraphs without also selecting a pull quote. If the pull quote is selected though, it shouldn’t interrupt the paragraph text.
Furthermore I absolutely hate when I’m trying to back to the beginning of a paragraph and suddenly the whole previous part of the page gets selected. I suspect the underlying model for what’s selected is too weak, and needs to be rethought. This may well be a little issue that requires a huge rearchitecting to fix.
