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Mozilla & Netscape Browser Blog

(There's a mixture of complaints in here: some from running Navigator on a un*x box, some from running it on a Windows machine, so not every complaint is relevant for every system type.) I simply cannot stand Mozilla 1.6, at least on Windows XP. The initial loading and rendering of pages is bad, and it gets many sites utterly wrong. In these modern days I use Firefox most of the time, even over IE, although FF certainly has its fair share of utter brokenness.

Thunderbird is also killing me.

121) All I want is to be able to set the minimum font size in FF, not override every aspect of fonts. But apparenly one can only set the lower bound if one also sets al the other font values as well, which is lame.
120) I love that Firefox (2.0.0.1) still doesn't know how to prevent multiple copies of the same bookmark being bookmarked ever over. Genius.
119) Got a new MacBook Core Duo 2. Moved old Eudora files off of the old iBook to the new machine. Installed TBird. Told it to read in the Eudora stuff... TBird crashes and dies. Nice.
118) What is the basic purpose of a web browser? I'd say it is to render web pages accurately. That means not only laying out the HTML, but getting the right version of the page. Why is it, then, that so many folks run into the issue of their web browser holding on to some invalid version of a file in its local cache? As a software developer I run into that all too often when I'm constructing web services, and I've seen regular folks trying to e.g. update their blog run into problems where the published version doesn't appear on their local machine. It is just all so mind-bogglingly wrong.
117) I love how Firefox gets some really basic UI wrong, and IE doesn't. It is a sad day when IE beats you. A particular example: if you have a long pop-up list on a web page, it might go off the bottom of your screen. The browser should figure that out and do whatever it must to make it usable. Firefox is failing; it just merrily draws the list off the bottom of the screen and I can't get to the things I want to select until I move the browser window up up up the screen to manually make room for the list. Complete and utter cluster fudge.
116) It kills me when I try to copy an address, which is inevitably on two or more lines, and paste it into the Google search field in Firefox to look up an address. What happens is only the first line gets pasted. Thanks a lot, how very user-friendly. Could there at least be a bloody item in the right-click menu to paste as a single line? Hate.
115) Dunno if it is Google's fault, or Firefox's, but I love how text gets chopped in the input field: that last item is actually a double-quote.
114) Oh, this is just too rich. Firefox lets you have the Adobe PDF viewer run inside, so when you click on a link to a PDF document, you are still "in" Firefox, but have the Reader features. However, the integration is really quite horrible because commands which used to work in Firefox suddenly stop working in that PDF view. For example, ctrl+w doesn't close the window any more (well, what is really weird is that sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't). Another example is that if you click on a Firefox menu (e.g. 'File') in the menu bar, and then want to click in the document page to get rid of that drop-down menu so that you haven't selected anything in the menu, it doesn't get rid of the menu. Firefox doesn't 'see' the click. So a super-duperly ingrained motor-memory type usability habit that everybody uses suddenly doesn't work at all. Pretty much, an obvious and complete UI disaster.
113) The bookmark UI has sundry issues of suck or lameness, including: If the bookmark list you have open is large, there will be arrows at the end of the list to help you navigate up and down the list to find things (I can also use the Home and End keys on the keyboard, at least on my Windows machine). However, the arrows are drawn even if there are no more entries in that particular direction; when you are at the top of the list, the up arrow is still drawn, and similarly when you are at the bottom of the list.
112) Freaking genius. I get info on a frame in FF. I want to get the URL of the frame itself, rather than the whole page. I select the URL in the info dialog box, and right-click, looking for the Copy command. I notice there is an "Undo" command that is not grayed out. Uh, riiight, that makes lots of sense in that context?!
111) The little icon for "Clean Up" in the Download window is pretty far-fetched. It looks a lot more like a "stop downloading anything right now" icon. What! Ever!
110) Holy poop! When using the Bookmarks Manager, if you drag-and-drop a bookmark into a folder, if you hover over the folder for too long while you are considering if that is really where you want it to go, suddenly the folder opens up and you are inside the folder's list, and there was no warning (I think most MS programs will flash the item that's about to open once or twice so that you know something is happening), and now i'm utterly discombobulted, and since the list of stuff in this folder is really long I don't know how to not drop the item in this folder without flailing about more than I should have to. This is the pinnacle of open source usability? Religious figure on a pogo-stick!
109) It kills me that the only options for downloading are "Open with" and "Save to Disk" and no way to say where on the disk to save it. There are times when I don't want it in the usual place, OK?
108) This just absolutely takes the cake: I use Firefox to go get the new version of Firefox. The web page automatically puts up a 'download' button of theoretically the right system type. So I download it and try to install it, and it turns out that it downloaded the i686 version when I'm running on Power PC. Freaking genius!
107) It drives me nuts how Firefox appears to get stuck "transferring data from" one web site, and the whole UI locks up; I can switch to a different tab. Have they never heard of threads?
106) More blatantly stupid usability; for me, the address auto-completion should show me the matching URLs in order of increasing length. That way I can easily get back to the home page of a given site, which is most often what I want out of the address completion feature. As it stands, it uses some apparently completely arbitrary method of ordering the URLs, and most often the results just suck ass.
105) Sweet! I really love having Firefox show the "print" version of an online order I just made for a split second, and then crash and exit so I have no details. Yeah, baby!
104) I don't know the reason, but Firefox can get into a state where you've made one connection to a site and that connection is slow in coming back, so you cancel it, and then try to do something different on the site and Firefox makes it look like that second URL isn't working either. But if you then use that URL in another browser, it works just fine. So it appears that the first link is still choking up Firefox, which is, like, great.
103) Firefox 1.5 is still stupid broken dumb; pop-up menus have the wrong background color and are hard to read. Great. Genius. Nice. This happens under Windows when I've got it set to have white as the background and black as the foreground. The "use system colors" option makes no difference. When I look at the same thing in Internet Explorer, the pop-up draws correctly with a white background.
102) Firefox will apparently auto-scroll the page when something I try to click on (e.g.: a form submit button) is almost off the bottom of the page. Not entirely off the page, not even any pixels off the page, just close to the bottom edge. So when I go to click, the thing moves it out from under me. So then I have to move the mouse cursor back up and click again. This is cutting edge usability?
101) Talk about inexcusable usability suckage. On my slower machines, I will often click on a different tab and then type a key (e.g.: page down, or Ctrl-W to close the tab), and Firefox will fail to apply the events in the right order; the key press will not go to the tab I first clicked on. This is state of the art? (Hey, and it happens under both Windows and Ubuntu so I expect it is the app, not the OS.)
100) Ever more Firefox UI suck (IE doesn't exhibit this problem): If you click on a link that goes to something that isn't responding, Firefox doesn't update anything on the screen other than the little wait cursors; the address field is not chnaged to the URL you clicked on, and the page itself is left alone. So it is really inconsistent that when I press the back button, it doesn't actually go back to the previous page (which is what IE does). Instead, it just stops loading the new page. (While I've admittedly made use of this to abort loading, I think it is bad behaviour and one should have to use the Stop button instead.)
99) I'm so glad that updating from Firefox 1.0.7 to 1.5 lost my home page setting. Way to go, kids, way to go! (Apparently, it was set to do that only the first time I ran it? Because the next time it had my home pages back. So that's even more confusing and hateful and evil and wrong.)
98) Yay. Firefox 1.5 still doesn't have "search by whole word" so that's really great.

97) I attended a talk about Firefox. The guys basically said they didn't have any real UI experience, so that's nice. But they did get an awful lot of mileage by keeping out people who had absolutely no clue about usability, which they said was like 99.9% of the people working on Mozilla. Basically, OSS developers are dumb geeks when it comes to UI. They also said they were aiming to make a browser that Grandma could use, and then a few slides later said that they had decided they would gratuitiously rip off the competition to get there. While I can understand some line of reasoning between those two points, I can also see lots of bad things about connecting those two points (and I see those bad things in Firefox).
96) The idea of being able to see the history in the browser quickly is nice. However, I think the decision to make it a little sliver of the Back button is completely stupid, wrong, and evil. The absolute kicker is that even if the mouse pointer is hovering over that little sliver, the tool-tip still says "Go back one page". Gah, hate! I think it is bloody obvious that a better place to put the wedge is on the bottom of the button, because that way you won't hit it when instead trying to press either the back or forward button. The trade-off, of course, is that you might hit a button in the bookmarks bar, or a tab for a window, or something else, but at least it would mean that when I go to press the back button I can do that more often than I can now.
95) (I haven't tried this on my linux machine, so I don't know if it is a Windows thing, or a Firefox thing.) I'm trying to manually enter a URL. I need to look at another window to see the data which helps me figure out the URL. So I'm Alt-Tabbing between the two windows, since Firefox is maximized. When I tab back to Firefox, the address field has become completely selected so that when I try to enter the next bit of the URL, everything I've entered so far goes away! I have to manually force it into regular text appending mode. That sucks ass.
94) Nice how the "resize large images to fit in browser" feature actually doesn't work for me. Oh, or are they going to some day add a feature that is the "resize large images to fit in frame"? Whatever, man.
93) Why is it that sometimes when I go to view a URL that points to a PDF, it shows up embedded in Firefox, and other times it puts up the "Open with - or - Save to Disk" dialog box, with no chance of viewing it as an embedded data type? Here, I'll give you the answer for free: because Firefox sucks.
92) It bugs me that Firefox has only 2 options when fetching e.g. a PowerPoint document: Either to open the file, or to save it. How about making my life a little bit easier by offering to save it and then immediately open it? (I know, you can sorta do that via the Downloads window, but then you have to have that sticking around, which sucks. Also, it is confusing because even if you choose "Open with" it will then put up a "download finished" alert, but the document doesn't appear in e.g.: My Downloads. No, it is in some temp directory somewhere. What! Ever!)
91) For some folks, the little 'Find' toolbar will automatically go away after some period of time. It never goes away for me. When it does go away, it changes the height of the vertical scroll bar, which changes where the little scroll bar arrows are for moving a line at a time, which screws people up. (Also? The find feature doesn't look for text inside text boxes on the page.)
90) CSS is a nightmare when it comes to implementations. Even the supposedly standards-loving Firefox screws it up here and there now and then.
89) It is impressive to me how often Firefox utterly locks up, forcing me to kill it, on both Windows and Ubuntu. And we're talking up-to-date versions, here. (My suspicion is that it is freaking out on some JavaScript.)
88) When Firefox finishes downloading a file, it might put up a little notification panel at the bottom right corner of the screen. It might be covering something I want. The panel has no close button. Excellent!
87) Firefox can't even render a page correctly (the image is cropped, so I'm not talking about that, I'm talking about how the very first link is suddenly line wrapped for no good reason). Note that IE desn't get it wrong! Nor does Lynx , etc.
86) You know how Ctrl-mouse-wheel can be used to zoom in and out? You know how in Firefox you can make a document's text get larger with that? Yeah, well, you know how it is the opposite of every other Windows application? What a flying piece of utter excrement.
85) True story: Firefox says it has critical updates to download and install, so I tell it to go ahead. The downloading progress bar goes nowhere, for tens of minutes. So instead, I download the latest version in 10 seconds with IE. Utter bloody geniuses, those Mozilla folks. The kicker is that after I ran the installer and then started up the new Firefox, it still claimed to have important updates - the red arrow was there. When I clicked on it, it said, oh, actually there are no updates. Double plus utter bloody genius. If only Opera weren't so insane.
84) Firefox does this thing where if I pause a little too long on one sub-menu of bookmarks, and it starts to try to draw those, and it takes a long time to draw them (don't even get me started on how lame that is!), and then I go to a different sub-menu that I really wanted, and pick a bookmark from there - it does nothing! It goes nowhere! As if I didn't actually select any bookmark at all! So then I have to go back and do it again, and then it tends to work. Oh, the hate.
83) Firefox is screwing me just like IE does: I want to view a file for which it (or the OS) thinks there is an associated application, and so when I click on the link to the file, the choices Firefox gives me are to open the file with the external application, or to save the file to disk. The file in question happens to simply be Java source code, and I just want to read the bloody text in the bloody web browser. But I can't! The kicker of it all is that the external application it wants to use was something I uninstalled yesterday. So much for uninstallers, Windows, or Firefox. See? Everybody is a complete and utter idiot, from the application developer through the OS developer, to the other application developer.
82) The 'Downloads' window kills me - it is pretty much always getting in the way. It should be a side-bar / frame instead.
81) This is cute: if you have a single page as your home page, pressing the home page button will take your current tab's view there. However, if you have multiple tabs as your home page, it won't check to see that you already have those tabs open, instead it will just go head and open N-1 new tabs. Yeah, that's terrific usability, there. Speaking for myself, it is completely not what I want. What I want is to have the starting state of the browser, which would be the multiple tabs, and then the home page which would be a single page, so that when I pressed the Home button it would just take the currently active tab there. (This is the kind of stuff that I should think would have been exposed as questionable in like 15 minutes of actual usability study with an actual user.)
80) The degree to which Firefox is flying excrement stuns me. There's apparently some security issue. I go to use the built-in update feature, and it says there is nothing to update. I don't trust that because I'm pretty sure I haven't updated recently or told it to auto update. So already it is completely failing to help me stay up-to-date on security fixes. Then, I go and follow the manual instructions to check the value via the "about:config" list, and it is the "bad" value. So there is not a single way for Firefox to get security fixes? That's really user friendly. And when I try to fix the value... the program crashes! It dies trying to simply toggle a boolean config value! This is the quality we get from one of the biggest and most promoted open source projects?
79) When I have a string like "foo bar baz" in a text field, and I want to seelect bar, I double-click on it and often Firefox selects not just "bar" but "foo bar". Apparently, if you double-click to the left of the bar, it tries to select the words around the space. That totally sucks, as far as I am concerned. I've pretty much never liked the so-called 'advances' people made in double-click selection interaction. I hate all that auto-sentence selecting crap!
78) It kills me that they do such a horrible job with the hilighting and greying out of things. I was clicking on the "Cancel" button and nothing was happening, as if Firefox has locked up, when the only problem was that the Cancel button was in fact inactive. Argh! Here's an example of badness and here's a quick and dirty example of how it could easily suck less.
77) When I click on a link that causes Firefox to bring up the dialog which gives me the option of saving the file to disk, it doesn't give me a way to rename the file. That kinda sucks.
76) If you try to use the mouse wheel in the code sample on this page in Firefox, nothing scrolls. The mouse pointer has to be outside the gray source code area. Terrific.
75) Of course, their Preferences UI is utter crap. Trying to figure out what colors it is going to use is hard - what does the "use system colors" checkbox do?! If it overrides the colors, then maybe they should be grayed out when the checkbox is checked. You know, feedback? Idiots!
74) When I use the mouse wheel to scroll on this page, the div that contains the Google ads also gets involved in the scroll, even though the focus is in the main body div. So scrolling is all screwy and juddery until the Google ads div reaches its limit. This is bloody stupid.
73) More proof that computers suck (because humans suck): I download a jar file through Firefox on my PC, and then I get an error dialog out of nowhere, titled "Java Virtual Machine Launcher" saying "Failed to load Main-Class manifest attribute from E:\...\foobar.jar". As if that means anything to your average user? I mean, it barely means anything to me and I'm a developer who uses Java! (Turns out Firefox defaults to opening jars with 'jarfile' rather than just saving the thing to disk. Whatever!
72) When trying to download multiple files from a single site, sometimes the number of connections is limited. What happens in that case is Firefox doesn't show you any feedback when you "Save Link As..." until one of your previous downloads has finished. No feedback. None. It doesn't queue anything, it doesn't tell you that it is waiting. Nada. Rien. Zilch. ...And then like ten minutes later or whatever, suddenly some by then seemingly totally bloody random dialog box appears asking you where you want to save this file it suddenly is all hot under the collar to get! Could we please get a UI team that lives in the modern world of usability?
71) Utter insanity. Safari does this, but I never expected Firefox to: On this iMac running OS X, tabbing in Firefox in a form actually skips over the drop-down (or pop-up, whatever you call them) menus! So you cannot fill out the form without a mouse. What the heck evil disability-hating planet are these people from? Dang.
70) Nice how Firefox's "Manage Bookmarks" UI doesn't let me actually rearrange bookmarks within a folder. You know, an operation that is "managing".
69) Firefox has gotten itself into a state where it refuses to show me the History sidebar. Ditto for Bookmarks. Nice!
68) SecureCRT has had this for years, so I don't understand why Firefox doesn't: If there is a URL that isn't hyperlinked, I want to be able to right-click on it and have a menu option that will take me to that URL.
67) Is it just me, or does Firefox put the "Preferences" menu option under different menus under different operating systems? Oh, and on Windows it is called "Options" rather than Preferences. Maybe it is following the standard conventions for the respective UI/OSs, but I live in a world that isn't just one OS (imagine that), so it drives me nuts that there's insufficient consistency.
66) I love how if you get into "full screen" mode there is nothing you can find in any of the available visible things, and nothing in the right-click menu, to get you back out. You have to know that F11 will get your menus back, otherwise you are totally screwed. Yeah, that's good usability.
65) It makes me mad that Firefox doesn't support re-ordering tabs.
64) Seems like every day I find another obviousl stupid thing about Mozilla. Today, it is that it totally dies on my (admittedly old, lame) PC when there is a background image on the web page; scrolling becomes mollases-in-winter-esque. Now, there are options for turning off all images, but there isn't one for only turning off background images, which is what I want. Guess I have to go write my own filter. Again. (And while I'm on the subject, I want there to be a toolbar button that toggles the use of my own colors. I could at least have used that in this case, for this specific page.)
63) I also love how Firefox's search will have the found text as the very last line of the window so you have no further context. Which means I then have to manually click in the body (because it doesn't support following the mouse pointer for the scroll wheel focus), scroll, and then repeat. In a document that has lots of hits I'm doing this all the time. Utterly retarded, literally, user interface here people. What, did you all work at Microsoft once or something?
62) The whole idea of embedding one application inside another is so clearly fraught with usability peril that I personally think anybody doing it sucks ass. To wit: I open a PDF in Firefox (having clicked on a hyperlink to it in a previous web page) and now Ctrl+t no longer opens a new tab, it does nothing at all. OK, this is great!
61) I think Firefox is re-ordering my bookmark folders when I add a bookmark. It seems to make the folder I just added-to become the top folder, which totally ruins any motor memory I might have. I'd like to turn that off, please, like I do to the same bloody thing in Windows. Could you totally not think of a better set of options to give people? I can, in about 10 seconds of thinking about it. Jerks.
60) I like how Firefox doesn't have a find option for getting only whole words.
59) Heaven knows how many years and how many millions of dollars later, and Firefox doesn't give me the option of not animating GIFs.
58) I love how Firefox asks me if I want it to remember passwords for web sites (form text entry field) and it has the option "Never for this site" when what I really want is the "Never for anything, anywhere, ever, so don't put up this stupid dialog box ever again" option.
57) It really gets me steamed that open source wares have yet to cotton onto the idea of not having an Exit command in the File menu for multiple-document applications. Close is fine, to close the current file, but it is dangerous and annoying to have Exit happen and nuke everything at once. IE doesn't even do that any more.
56) Firefox can show you a list of previous strings you have entered into a particular web form text box. So if, for example, you are re-entering a search string in Google, you can select the one Firefox presents you instead of having to retype it all. That's sorta nice and all, but there are two things which it screws the pooch on there. One is that, at least on my slower G3s, it gets in the way of it recognizing my attempt to double-click in the text box to select all the text. Two is that if you are entering the string into Google's search at the bottom of the page, and it matches several old searches, Firefox draws the list of possible matches right over the bloody text entry field, so you can't see what you are typing!
55) It is nice to see that Firefox's bookmark management is as horribly lame an unintuitive as IE's or anybody elses. Example suckage: the order of the bookmarks when you see them in the regular Bookmark menu seems to be the order in which they were added. However, when you go to the Bookmarks Manager interface they are presented in alphabetical order (you can choose by Name, Location, yadda). I do not see a way to get the same ordering in both places. I would not like those interfaces in a boat, I would not like them on a goat.
54) Firefox sucks because while it uses Ctrl-F to start a search, it doesn't use it to iterate the search, which is how I think it should work.
53) Apparently, Firefox has no support for splitting a window or tab. So that sucks.
52) Firefox is killing me. I've got some frames in this page I'm looking at, and when I try to search for something it starts off looking in a frame I don't care about, and I haven't figured out how to restrict it to the frame I want. Clicking in the frame I want doesn't seem to reset the search to start from there, nor does selecting text there. Apparently, my only choice is to search through all the frames. That's bloody genius. Oh the hate. (Recently, I have seen it sometimes resepect where I clicked. But only sometimes.)
51) Firefox 1.0.3 lets you turn off image loading, but then it doesn't give you any way to selectively load an image other than to view it on its own. So that sucks - I want to see the images I want in context, not out of it. Duh!
50) Firefox 1.0.3 screws the pooch pretty darned well when it comes to the bookmark UI! A small example: From the 'Bookmarks' menu, my bookmark folders are listed as: Bookmarks Toolbar Folder, separator, Dell, Machine, Misc, Work. When I go to add a bookmark, the list in the 'Add Bookmark' dialog box has a couple issues. First is that the hierarchical view of the bookmarks cannot be set to always be open, as far as I can tell. Second is that while they are listed in the correct order in the hierarchical menu, they are listed in a totally different order in the pop-up menu: Bookmarks (which doesn't appear at all from the main Bookmark menu, so that is confusing the first few times), Misc, Bookmarks Toolbar Folder, Dell, Machine. Now, for the longest time I've thought that only Microsoft could screw up something so basic as the ordering of the bookmarks folder, but here I am faced with half a decade, and heaven only knows how many millions of dollars, worth of work that has managed to be just as utterly pathetic.
49) Firefox sucks. Or maybe it is Windows, who knows? I guess in the end the real answer is just that everything sucks. To wit, I start up Firefox, and then while it is starting up I switch to some other window. The window for Firefox is drawn in behind the window I'm working in, and the titlebar for Firefox is flashing. It doesn't stop. It keeps flashing. It is really distracting and really pissing me off. So I switch to Firefox, and it has a dialog box saying that it isn't my default browser, would I like to change, etc.? As if that was the most important thing on Earth, totally important enough to interrupt the other thing I was doing. Yessir.
48) Holy poop! The progressive search in Firefox doesn't keep the found item on the screen while the page is loading things like images etc. so the thing you found disappears off the screen before your very eyes! The kicker is that this is happening on the bloody Mozilla site itself, so either they are dumb because they didn't specify image sizes in their web pages, or they are dumb because their browser doesn't know what to do with image sizes to prevent things from shifting around from underneath me while the page is loading. This is all like super lame usability 101, people! Thirty seconds with the product is all a lobotomized paramecium would need to find this kind of pathetic crap!

47) Holy double poop! I want to turn off Flash. Looking in the Options dialog I don't see anything obvious. So I read the FAQ (and hit the thing above about the search being expletively stupid) and it tells me about the Plug-Ins stuff and it explicitly says "you can disable [Flash] here, which will block any Flash ads and animations until you enable the plug-in again." The kicker in this case is that when I bring up the Plug-Ins window on my machine, there is no entry for Flash so there is no way for me to disable the bloody thing! Where, oh where, do I start the killing?
46) Scrolling with the mouse wheel in Firefox under OS X on my Mac is a completely hate generating experience. It scrolls way too fast, and yet there's no option that I can find to tell it to slow the hell down. Apparently I'd have to tell all of OS X to slow the wheel scrolling down, which totally screws the pooch in all other apps. The exact same page at the exact same size in Safai doesn't exhibit the problem; Safari's scrolling is way better compared to Firefox (either with smooth scrolling on or off in Firefox). (The only reason I wanted to use Firefox rather than Safari was the hope that I could disable (only) Flash - no luck with that yet in Firefox, either.) (Oh, yeah, and the mouse wheel doesn't work in the Preferences dialog, nice!)
45) I'm trying to install flashblock from the Mozilla developer site. I get a notice in Firefox that I have to edit my options to let it install software (why can't I just download it and then install it?). So I click on "Edit Options..." and turn on software downloads, but I'd like to not just leave it open to the whole world, I'd like to set the site list to only include this Mozilla dev site. The problem is that the type of dialog box they've used for entering sites is not floating, is not movable. It is blocking the address field. So for one, I can't copy-and-paste the text, and for another I can't even read the bloody web site name to be able to enter it manually! Holy stupid pain in the ass, Batman! [Update: Another kicker, here: after I've told it to allow installation of software, then it gives me the regular choice to download the file vs. opening it. I don't see, on the face of it, why downloads and installing software are so intertwined in confusing-to-an-average-user ways. And the installation page never says where you are actually downloading from, and the dialog box that comes up gives you some random load-balanced server rather than some canonical site. It just doesn't give me much feeling of safety. Where are the MD5 sums? Where are the PGP keys? WTF?]
44) I click on the Back button in Firebird, and hold it until the list of previous addresses appears, then go and choose one. The browser goes there. But! That list of addresses doesn't go away, even though I've long let go of the mouse button. The only way to get rid of it is to press the Esc key. Whatever.
43) On forms that have drop-down (or pop-up?) menus, Firefox doesn't let me tab to them to then do something there via the keyboard. That's a great accessability story there, guys.
42) Firefox scrolls just fine when I'm manually dragging the scroll bar around. But when I use the mouse wheel, it is super choppy and discombobulating and makes it difficult to figure out where you ended up when "smooth scrolling" is off, and when it is on then the application lags way behind so I always end up overshooting where I want to be. Why does it suck so much when it has already proven that it can do the task? Suck!
41) Firefox 1.0PR lacks all sorts of things that I want. Big example: turning off animated GIFs.
40) Mozilla also completely fails to remember the layout of the page I was literally just on. I click on the back button and the page doesn't just appear, as it does in IE, no, instead it has to slowly completely re-download and pathetically re-render. Both IE & Moz are set to not check the page every time, yet only IE appears to actually respect that.
39) IE doesn't move the page around much at all as it is loading; only if there are slow-downloading pictures that don't have dimensions explicitly defined in the source HTML tags. Mozilla, on the other hand, apparently shows the page step-by-step - or, in other words, Mozilla shows its underwear. The page comes in and it doesn't look anything like the final page, and then the format freaks out once or twice as the other components are parsed by the engine. Or something. I don't know exactly why it is doing this, I just know it is crap from a usability perspective. This is supposed to storm the IE empire? Whatever.
38) Mozilla is killing me. I've got some download windows open from it. I have SecureCRT running, from which I use "Open URL" which opens a new Mozilla navigator window. But it all works out such that Alt-Tab doesn't take me back to SecureCRT, rather to the download window. So I'm stuck between Mozilla windows. (I know I'm not stuck, I can Alt-Tab-Tab, but I shouldn't have to Tab-Tab, I really should only have to Tab.)
37) It makes me angry that Mozilla 1.6 defaults to keeping copies of all your forms information and passwords. Forget that stuff!
36) Mozilla 1.6 doesn't remember the font sizes I set via the View menu when I quit and restart it. Whatever.
35) I'm trying Mozilla 1.6. I do "View Source" which brings up a new window showing me the HTML source for the page. I then try to search for a particular string that I know is in the source... and it says that the search failed. So then I click the mouse in the source text which apparently sets the cursor focus. Now, when I search, it successfully finds the text. And this is supposed to take over the world from Microsoft warez?
34) Netscape Navigator 4.76 which came with Redhat 7.1 is all broken in several ways. It is pretty funny how completely screwed Mozilla and all that crap is. Sheesh.
1. It doesn't remember what I set the preferences to the last time I used it.
2. Whenever I bring up the preferences, it puts up some dialog talking about how "The scrollbar page increment is less than 1." Uh, yeah. Great.
3. No matter what I set the fonts to, even though I tell it to always override the document fonts, the fonts never get any bigger. Oh, and it only lists 0 and 12 point for fonts. What? What the hell is a zero point font? Argh! I say allow scaling and set them to 18 point, to 20 point, and nothing changes.
4. When I go to save a file, it brings up the file browser. It already has the path and the name of the file listed. If I want to put the file in another directory, I go pick that directory... and then the name of the file is no longer there. It has gone. It should just update the path but keep the file name, duh.
33) [Submitted] Wow. Once in a while I use Netscape Composer. The dorky thing is that it frequently does this thing where it wraps the text to be about 2 characters larger then the window. So it always has its horizontal scroll bar enabled, and your text doesn't quite fit and gets clipped on both sides. Resizing the window doesn't help, because the composer is the one deciding to wrap the text, and it will re-wrap the text to be just a little too wide for the new window size. Lovely. Did they ever actually use this thing?
32) Wow. So far, Mozilla is just a huge piece of crap! It crashes. It can't handle multiple windows under Win2k. Its interface is not only completely non-standard, it is also horrendously annoyingly stupid and ugly. You can't right-click to copy the address field text under Windows (at least, under Win2k). Whatever. What a huge piece of crap. It doesn't even respect the size of scrollbars in the windowing environment so I have these 2 pixel wide useless things. My lord, I don't understand how people can do this kind of thing. It doesn't come with Java, and when I go to get the plug-in for it, it just dumps me on Sun's site with absolutely no instructions about how to get it to actually work with whatever I might arbitrarially choose to download. It's so completely retarded.
31) At least on the Mac, pop-up menus cannot be selected using the tab key!
30) Say you are going through some search engine hits, and you are opening up new pages for the links. The new pages cover up the results page, always. There is no way to convice it to open up the windows else where. So you have to keep on raising that window manually to get it back. Not only that, it takes the window dimensions from the source window. Instead, it should do what IE does - take the position and size from the last window opened, not the last one on top.
29) When you open a link in a new window, it doesn't update the link color in the original window to note that you've already looked at that page. What a total piece of junk.
28) I do not understand. I right-click and it brings up the menu, and then I hit one of the keyboard shortcuts and the menu item hilights... but nothing else actually happens.
27) Is it me, or do the Home and End keys still do absolutely nothing?
26) Some additions from a reader (I assume he wishes to remain anonymous?):
1. Why does it insist on mangling the '.'s in filenames to '_' except for the last '.'? Every filesystem I have to use can handle multiple '.'s in a filename.
2. "Bookmarks" used to be a menu, and I could access it with Ctrl-B. Ever since NS4.0 this has been broken. If NS3 didn't complain about y2k site certificates I'd still be using it. [Editor's Note: 4.7 does bring up a bookmarks window for me with Ctrl-B, on Win 2k.]
25) I just want it to show a .java file as a text file. What is so hard about that? It wants me to make all sorts of stupid mappings, and then that whole process really sucks.
24) For any version, the command to close the window is right next to the command to quit the entire application. They keyboard short cuts are right next to each other, as well.
23) Sometimes the address text is selected, and you then click on a different application, and then back on Communicator, and the address text is still hilighted and you figure it's selected, but when you type... nothing happens. The field doesn't really have focus, it's just drawn that way.
22) The N icon and the cylon eye activity bar keep going even when Communicator has put up a dialog box saying it can't get to the site. Not only is that stupid, it's extra annoying when the window is behind other windows and you want those visual clues to let you know when you should bother to bring the window to the top of the window stack; you can't tell any difference between successfully loading over a really slow connection and an utterly failed load. Brilliant!
21) I have no idea how the selection & cursor behaviour of the auto url completion works. In IE, you can hit tab to accept the current completion and then type more and maybe have more completions. Tab doesn't seem to work like that under Communicator. It moves the focus away from the address field. You can't hit space. Return accepts the completion and you can't type any more. What a completely useless piece of crap.
20) The options you have for printing are really pathetic. You can't even print a selection!
19) I'm so glad they put "Open in New Window" right next to "Open Link in Composer" which utterly thrashes your machine.
18) I'm so glad they added a "Shop" button in the toolbar, which I never want to use, and which pushes the "Stop" button, which I really do want to use all the time, off the right hand edge and under the Netscape icon, so I can't get to it any more at the window size I like.
17) This is probably a Windows problem, but it happened in Navigator: if you have one modal dialog open, e.g.: the options, and another is generated, e.g.: you are loading a page in the background which then asks for a plug-in, the second dialog can be hidden behind the first one. You can't dismiss the top dialog. It let me pick different parts of the option hierarchy, but it refused to do anything when i hit "OK" or "Cancel" or even the "X" close button. I got lucky in that I moved the dialog around and then saw the one it was hiding that was causing all the trouble!
16) Under CDE, it gets all stupid about maximized windows. If you maximize a window, then the next window you bring up is sized maximally. That's annoying enough, but to make matters worse, it's not in "maximized" mode, where you could go back to the regular size with a click of the button. The new window's size has started out at the maximum size.
15) If you are on a long page, and you click on a link, when you then hit back to return to the long page, you don't go back to where you were. Instead, it mostly puts you at the top of the page, or sometimes it puts you somewhere utterly arbitrary; it sure as heck doesn't put you back where you left off. It's been broken like this for many years now, and 4.7 still doesn't get it right!
14) When you are going to save a file that you are downloading, it starts off with a name for it, and a current directory. If you start to move around in the directories to put it somewhere, the name goes away. It should keep the name and just alter the path.
13) Applets ignore the SunOS sound volume. I have sound turned off, yet the applets still make noise. That's the much touted Java portability across OSs or something? (Update: sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It could be that SunOS's volume controls suck. I know they do somewhat, because the audio control panel's mute button seems to put itself in a random state when you start up the panel.)
12) The redraw during scroll is bad news. It flickers, it flickers, it flickers. How long has the idea of double buffering been around?
11) The search is lame. It finds stuff but doesn't redraw the window, so the hit is either entirely off the bottom, or maybe like a line of pixels (one row high) is peeking up and I'm supposed to notice that and then scroll down.
10) The "click on this to make the toolbar collapse down" widgets are on the left hand side. They are too close to the back button. Every once in a while you will click on the widget by accident, and then you have to click again to get it back... yet it takes many seconds for it to respond. I should be able to turn them off, right or they should be on the right hand side of the toolbars.
9) The selection hilight color is yellow. It doesn't change if you have a page with a yellow background. So then you can't see your selection. (Never mind that it also has problems merely selecting text in the first place.)
8) When viewing the contents of an FTP directory, it truncates the names of the files, the most important information.
7) It doesn't render things generated by MS FrontPage properly (? rather than '). Lynx doesn't have the same problem.
6) It locks up X (all of X!) whenever I try to read newsgroups.
5) It randomly bus errors. I don't even have java script on, and it bus errors. What the heck is so difficult about rendering HTML that it leads to bus errors? The underlying code must be such utter dreck.
4) Copy (and thus paste) doesn't actually work. Sure, sometimes it does, but a lot of the time it doesn't. And there's no error message, no explanation for why not. It just doesn't. Even when it does, it is broken and can't copy more than some small number of glyphs, so to copy larger text you have to do it in multiple chunks. i mean, what the heck? as if copy-and-paste is some alien hard technology?
3) Menu buttons are inconsistent: the bookmark pop up menu will go away if you click on "Bookmarks" again, but the File / Edit / ... menus don't do that.
2) If I specify the colors I want, and say to always override the page's colors, then I expect that is what should happen. Instead, only some of the page's colors are overriden. Things like nested paragraph coloring don't seem to be affected. Not to mention that it's pretty random if Netscape will even condescend to actually use my colors in the first place - sometimes I have to hit reload twice before it will cave in.
1) I think it doesn't tell you if you've already filed a bookmark. I think IE does, and that's good.