ergophobe - 9:47 pm on Dec 8, 2004 (gmt 0)

Heh heh, that should attract some readers.

Let's just agree that Firefox has it's plusses. Visiting my folks over the holidays I was forced to use IE and it was unpleasant. Firefox has been my default browser since back when it still had other names.

More and more, though, I find it the most cumbersome and annoying browser I've ever used for the end user. Granted, NS4 and IE* are far more annoying for the developer. Even as an end user, I find that Firefox has really two things that recommend it to me

1. tabbed browsing (but I can get that with Opera or with IE via something like Maxthon or Crazy Browser).

2. The numerous developer extensions - developer toolbar, Venkman debugger, things like that which most end users don't care about. Judging from the broken pages all over the place, neither do a healthy number of developers.

My biggest gripe is the terrible tendency to lock up when reading PDFs. I have long noticed this, but it has become a real sore point since losing my high-speed connnection. Now I wait forever for PDFs and Firefox trips all over itself trying to handle them.

So my gripes not in the least in brief....

- freezes up when loading a pdf (much much longer hesitation than IE - as in an order of magnitude or two). Then, after showing the first page, if you scroll way down to an unloaded section of the PDF, the whole thing freezes up until the PDF gets loaded to that point. If you've already hit the "stop" button once, it thinks it *is* stopped so you can't even use that to stop the loading. Very frustrating on a slow connection. My browser is stopped up like that as I write this (on Wordpad since, of course, Firefox is stuck) and I can't even look at the content in the other tabs because the whole thing is frozen until it downloads the PDF to the point that I scrolled to. I can't even close the browser. On some occasions I've resorted to shutting down the internet connection and reconnecting. I suspect that PDFs are not becoming more common, but since losing the high-speed connection, it seems like every third page is a PDF - or at least 1/3 of the time I spend waiting for things to load is spent waiting for a PDF.

- many problems with copy and paste. It often doesn't work with the CTRL-C/CTRL-V sequences and I have to right click and select from the menu. It's the only program I have that does this and FF does it so often I don't even try to use keyboard sequences for copy and paste. I often find the same thing is true of CTR-T to open another tab. I often have to click it multiple times before the tab opens.

- sometimes a folder of my bookmarks disappear even though it still shows up in the bookmark manager (and no, it's not a scrolling issue). They reappear upon closing and restarting Firefox.

- often, if it's still loading pages in other tabs, it fails when you try to bookmark the current tab.

-if you're in a window opened by a javascript script that doesn't have a tab bar, it will let you CTRL-click to open links in new tabs, but they will be in the background and you can't get to them or you can't get back to the tab you started with. When you close the window, it will tell you you have several tabs open, but there's no way to see those pages.

- password manager doesn't work if site demands password then username instead of username then password (I reported this to Bugzilla already and has been confirmed as a bug).

- password manager doesn't fill in fields until the page has fully loaded, which can be forever on a dial-up. There may be legitimate security reasons, but PM just doesn't seem as good as in IE.

- the search function. Aside from its annoying placement at the bottom of the screen (not obvious when it pops up; terrible ergonomics since it is as far as possible from top menus), there again I find it often won't open if I'm in one tab and content is still loading in other tabs.

- print preview gives you the same number of total pages, even as you change the sizing. So you have four pages and you're looking at page 1 of 4. Then you shrink the text tiny so you only have one page. Now you're still looking at page 1 of 4. But there are no other pages.

So there it is... the most annoying browser ever?

Tom