Bugs and Annoyances in the
Firefox 3 Beta

From the perspective of a Mac user

I’m a front-end developer for Last.fm, and mainly use Firefox/Firebug for development. For normal web browsing, I use Safari because there are just too many annoyances in Firefox.

While Firefox 3—which I’ve used for about six weeks now—is a big improvement over Firefox 2, there are still lots of things that don’t feel right. I guess a large chunk of them are due to stuff not being finished because it’s still a beta. I’ll just throw them in for good measure anyway.

• The window sizing is quite inventive. Windows open in jazzy positions and funny sizes. It still doesn’t reliably save the window size on closing/reopening. Tooltips appear in the wrong places. Windows aren’t automatically resized when moving them to a smaller screen. (All on my dual-screen setup, using Firefox on the secondary screen.) (And it’s been like that forever, by the way.) This is great if you want to train your mouse-aiming skills, but not so good for keeping calm.
• Speaking about windows. There are various problems with the window chrome at the moment:
  • The gradient in the titlebar/toolbar doesn’t look right. It looks different from the regular window gradient in Mac OS. This bugged me right from the start. Just a few days ago, I even read a blog post describing the Firefox toolbar as looking pregnant, as opposed to the plump gradient in all other Mac toolbars.
  • When hiding the toolbar, the gradient isn’t compressed (like it is in every other Mac app). That looks really weird. One might extend the pregnant bit from above to cesarean-section-gone-wrong jokes, but I won’t do that here. Do Hide Toolbar in Safari for an example how it should look like, though.
  • I can’t drag the window by clicking anywhere in the toolbar, I have to use the title bar. This is inconsistent with the rest of the OS, where you can just drag by clicking anywhere that’s not a button.
  • Source lists, buttons, or anything, for that matter—nothing gets an inactive state for inactive windows. Even inactive windows don’t get the inactive treatment.
  • On a related note: please respect that I set the OS appearance to graphite. That means things like focus rings (around the location input, for example) or the bookmark star should be toned down a bit and not look like a sweet shop.
• The little close buttons for the tabs belong on the left. Just look at every other app. It’s a bit like driving: in some countries, you drive on the left side, and in others, you drive on the right side. In Macland, you drive on the left. Or you crash full-frontal. Into the user experience.
• The more-saturated-on-hover fav icons freak me out every time I move the mouse pointer around the tabs. I also think they just add clutter. You could remove them and then use the space for the close buttons, as mentioned above.
• Also, the default keyboard shortcut for switching tabs should be in line with what Safari or the Terminal or various other apps use.
• The location bar input shouldn’t be round. It’s not a search field. Only search fields should be round. (And footballs, of course.)
• Don’t select the whole URL for me when I click in the location bar. I have clicked in there to append or correct something and just overwritten the URL too many times now—Google already wonder why I search for ‘login’ all the time.
• Please just give in and copy Safari’s progress bar in the location bar. The throbber only shows when the page is loading, for the rest of the time it only leaves an emtpy spot in the toolbar that looks weird. At least move it somewhere else where it doesn’t mess up the layout when it’s not there.
• What’s that weird diamond/arrow/triangle next to the history drop-down thing that appears when the location bar is empty? Doesn’t do anything when clicked, just sits there, makes me think why it sits there instead of entering the URL I want to go to.
• I think the grey bookmark star in Proto 0.12.1 fit in with the rest of OS X way better than the tacky blueish-glowing one in 0.12.2 and above.
• I find ‘unfiled bookmarks’ to be an unlucky name for the default bookmark folder—to me it somehow conveys the notion I have to enter tags and sort all my bookmarks neatly when all I want is to just bookmark something and be done with it. Also, technically, if something’s in a folder, it is filed. </analmode>
• In the unified refresh/stop button argument, I’m pro unification. Then again, I guess can understand the reasons for two separate buttons. I would never go out with anyone who likes it that way, though.
• I’ve yet to meet someone who likes the weirdly shaped back/forward buttons. I was really relived to see that changing the display to ‘use small icons’ makes them a lot nicer.
• When I hide the status bar, the resize widget overlays the scroll-down button.
• Scrollbars are cut off/not shown (vertical ones) on the side if the window is too narrow.
• Could command+z maybe re-open the last closed tab? It worked for me in Safari in Tiger. I can’t remember if it was a default shortcut or if some plugin added it (I don’t use input managers anymore). It was useful anyway.
• I’d love to have the find bar appear at the top of the window, not at the bottom. This way, I wouldn’t have to search for it first before being able to use it to find what I’m actually looking for. Also, the next previous buttons in there could do with some right/left arrows. Maybe even only right/left arrows. Or some weird diamond/arrow/triangle things?
• The context menus don’t look like all the other ones in OSX. They don’t have rounded corners. Just wanted to point that out.
• The spellchecker context menu doesn’t look like the standard Mac OS X spellchecker context menu.
• The source list in the library doesn’t look like a native source list. It also doesn’t have a resize handle. You have to hit and use the 1-pixel-wide border. This has really improved my abilities with the mouse and made me better at UT’s instagib CTF.
• Also, if the source list in the library loses focus, the currently selected item should still look like it’s selected, just a little grayer or something, like in the Mail or iTunes source list. But the selection should definitely not go away. At the moment, you can’t really tell where you are once the source list loses focus (by selecting an item from the main area, for example). And that source list looks rather cramped in general, anyway.
• In the library, when you click on ‘bookmarks menu’, there are weird dashed horizontal lines as separators. They confused me, at first I thought it was a visual glitch. Turns out they’re separators the user can add. I guess one could make them look a little nicer.
• The zebra-striping for stuff in the library should extend all the way to the bottom of the window, even if there aren’t as many items. See all other Mac OS X apps for reference.
• The vertical divider in the library looks weird. See Mail for how it should look. And the change from the resizing cursor to the pointer cursor when hovering over the resize handle feels wonky and unpredictable to me.
• In the library, there are at least two different styles of more/less toggles; the arrow-on-a-square-button one on the right of the inputs and the round-arrow-with-‘more’-text one below the inputs. Can’t you just use one? That would ease the cognitive burden on my mind. Or am I missing something there? I guess I’m missing something there. Am I?
• If you select an item from the history (in the library), you can’t edit its properties. Why shouldn’t you be able to tag it from there? I’ll assume it’s broken in the beta.
• I don’t like the new sliding-down thing that asks if you want to save the password for a site. It’s really slow to set that preference now. Before, you could just hit tab and space to tick the checkbox that used to be in the dialog asking for the username and password. What was bad about that? Don’t make my skills obsolete! Anyways, who wouldn’t want to save that password? The only time I wouldn’t want Firefox to save that password is on public computers. A mode for private browsing (let’s call it ‘private browsing mode’, for example) could help here. Or at least a ticked-by-default checkbox.
• Why does Firefox ask me for a username/password every time I visit the same http-auth protected site anyway? How many users change that password at all? I’d wager very few people do it very few times. My mum doesn’t, for example. I don’t. So I think Firefox should do it like Safari; ask for the username/password only once and then not bother my mum or me anymore. I would love to know what the reason for the repeated asking is. Just indicate the http-auth status with a little lock icon or a weird diamond/arrow/triangle.
• If you click one of the ‘drop-down buttons’ in the library/bookmarks/however-it’s-called-toolbar and then keep the mouse button pressed and move it away and then release it, the drop-down menu stays. It should go away if the mouseup event is not on the button.
• Some tab-buttons, such as the ones in the ‘Add-ons’ window, have no pressed state. It’s subtle, but it feels out of place. Also, in the same window, when you toggle the toolbar, you’re left with a grey space. (I think there shouldn’t even be a toolbar toggle in that window. Windows don’t have to have it. It’s optional.)
• The toolbar tabs in the preferences don’t look right.
• Every text input should have emacs key commands (like control+t to transpose characters and so on). Not because emacs is better than vim, but because they’re supported by native apps and are used surprisingly often (by me, that would be, at least).
• Up and down keys should take you to the beginning/end of text inputs, as in all other apps.
• The green zoom button still doesn’t work properly, it toggles between ‘fill up all of my screen, no matter how much space the web page actually needs’ and ‘last size set by user’. Please make it toggle between ‘space needed by current web page’ and ‘last size set by user’.
• Add a ‘new window’ option to Firefox’ dock menu. That’d be sweet.
• Holding down command should always open stuff in a new tab/window. Example: holding it down when sending forms. Or in the search field in the toolbar.
• Pressing command+control+d with the mouse pointer over a word should bring up a pop-up dictionary thing, as it does in every other app. Incredibly helpful for those of us who aren’t native English speakers. (Basically, I think this goes under ‘provide text services integration’.)
• Two-finger scrolling (via the track pad) is really choppy compared to other apps. It’s like ‘escalator : falling down the stairs’ from a smoothness point of view.
• When I refresh a page, please save where I scrolled to and take me back there. Might be a developer-thing, as I refresh pages quite constantly, but every other browser does it, just not Firefox.
• Viewing PDFs in-browser. It’s okay to hate them, but one doesn’t need to show it so openly.
• Add the ‘mail contents of this page’ and ‘mail link to this page’ options from Safari, with their respective keyboard shortcuts. Once you have them, you wonder how you were able to do without them!
• It would be great if Firefox could use the same cursors as Safari. I.e. the pointer with a shadow, same move cursor, etc. I find they look a lot nicer. And you can actually tell what they mean.
• Please use proper punctuation for the copy. This includes proper quotes (“”) instead of double primes (") and proper apostrophes (’) instead of primes ('), as well as dashes instead of hyphens. I know no one on Windows or Linux cares about this, but it’s rather common practice on Mac OS.
• The help viewer hasn’t gotten any love yet, has it? It looks like a windows appp. It doesn’t even use Lucida Grande. I think if you changed the font, fixed the weird toolbar and made the search field and the buttons look a little nicer, that would give you a nicer-looking result without too much effort. Since Leopard’s weird always-in-the-front help app, it’s actually a good idea not to use it, so please don’t ;)

Things I like

I’d also like to mention some things I like. This is by no means an exhaustive list—I merely felt I should at least give some praise so that the few who read this won’t hate me too much.

• I really like that they’ve gotten rid of the ‘add this site to the list of allowed sites’ tantalisingness when trying to installing extensions. Every time an extension is installed, a kitten will rejoice.
• Supposed support inline-block and ­, and to clip background-images to -moz-border-radius. Especially the first one really means a lot to me, believe it or not.
• The text rendering looks a lot better, especially when transparent elements come into play. And they finally solved the issue whereby a single transparent element would disable subpixel-anti-aliasing for the whole page (at least on Mac OS X).
• The concept of having a bookmark indicator/button (the little star in the location bar) is quite a good idea.
• The overall look is more Mac-like. With a few exceptions. See the list above.
• Growl-support. While I personally don’t care, some people I know do, and I take it as a sign the developers take Mac OS more serious now.

I like Firefox

It might not come across, but I really, really like Firefox. It was my browser of choice when I was still using Windows, till 2005. From what I remember, it seemed way better integrated into the OS. I wish the same was the case for Firefox on Mac OS. But as a Mac user, just leisurely browsing the web, I can’t help being irritated at it all the time as things just won’t work as expected.

I guess a lot of people would make a point about Firefox’ extension system and how there isn’t anything like that for Safari, arguing that it negates a lot of the other niggles. Fair enough; as mentioned above, the very reason I use Firefox at all is an extension: Firebug. It’s an incredibly brilliant tool for web development. For regular web browsing though, I don’t need Firebug nor any other extensions. So for me, personally, the extension argument doesn’t count. Hence I don’t use Firefox—there’s nothing in it that’s better than Safari, but lots of little things that are worse.