The most annoying problems in Mozilla Firefox 3.0.6

Introduction

Many people love Mozilla Firefox. For some reason it surpasses opera browser in popularity (or at least, it is said so) - possibly because it might be better than IE, or perhaps because of number of extensions, or because Firefox is yet another example of OpenSource philosophy.

List of problems

However, it has some problems that are clearly not going to disappear any time soon.
Below is the list of those problems. All problems happen on dualcore linux machine with 2Gb of RAM. Most of them exist on Windows XP as well. So you can't blame hardware or operating system.

1. Bug with resizing windows.

How to reproduce: open any Firefox dialog (preferences, or whatever). Now drag bottom right corner of dialog to the left and up. See what happens:


Typically this is a standard problem which occurs in GUI applications made by beginner programmer. However, in Firefox this bug has exists at least since 2.0.0.x version.

2. Slow startup

Firefox 3.0.6 takes at least 8 seconds to start up, more if it is started from "cold boot". On my system "cold boot" launch of firefox takes at least 15 seconds. This is quite annoying.

3. Firefox frequently stops responding

Firefox frequently stops responding for a very long time. 10, perhaps 30 seconds. Normally this happens when you type something into "location bar" - there is a very good probability that browser will hang in the middle of the word, won't accept any input for quite a while, and even won't repaint browser window. After "sleeping" for quite some time browser will suddenly wake up and finally show the rest of the phrase you were trying to enter. Firefox also stops responding for prolonged period when you open history. Or when you try to search history. Or when you attempt to close browser (which can be seen here). It also happens randomly when you try to load pages. It looks like problem is related to the way how browser history is stored. The problem exists since the first release of Firefox 3.

4. It is not possible to right-click link on the page when another page is loading

This is the only problem which exists on Linux only - It is not possible to right click a link on the page in the tab if another page is about to load. Doesn't sound like a big problem, but it is still annoying.

5. It is not possible to disable javascript when "alert" is being shown

Without adding more extensions it is not possible to disable javascript when you see alert shown by javascript. Have you ever run into a script which launches series of "alert" messages? When you run into such webpage, you will easily notice the problem.

6. No reasonable keyboard navigation

Caret mode is a joke - it is simply too slow when using from keyboard. And although it is possible to instantly focus to individual tab using keyboard shortcut (which is good), it isn't possible to navigate page with reasonable speed using keyboard only. For example, in Opera you can quickly navigate between links on the page if you use Shift+Arrow Keys, in firefox this feature is still missing.

7. Page loses focus for some reqson

On completely random occasions interesting thing happens: you can't jump to location bar using keyboard shortcut unless you first click on the page with mouse.

8. Stops responding to keyboard shortucts when flash movie is shown

When there is a flash content on the website, it is possible that you won't be able to close tab with this content using keyboard shortucts (Ctrl+F4 or Ctrl+W), unless you first click on the page somewhere outside of the flash content. Same things seems to happen with java applets as well.

9. It is not possible focus to "find" box without mouse if you view image

Assume you were viewing some page, tried to find some text on it (using Ctrl+F) and then opened some image in the same tab. You will notice that "Search" window is still present at the bottom of the screen. On normal page, to dismiss it without using mouse by pressing Ctrl+F (which will move text entyr cursor into search bar), and the "Escape" In case of image this won't work - you'll have to click on the text in search bar, then press "Escape". Happens frequently.

10. When saving picture to hard disk, it looks like it is being downloaded again

This is simply illogical. When you right click on any image and attempt to save it to disk, "Downloads" window will appear. On window platform picture will be even scanned by antivirus. I just don't understand why this works this way. Picture is already inside of browser cache, so there is no reason to downlaod it again - it will simply take longer.

Conclusion

So far I know the only two reasons to use firefox

• Ad Block plus
  
• some plugin which is supported only on Firefox.
  

Other than that, Firefox 3 gives the impression of unfinished and unpolished product with a lot of problems, several bugs, and very poor support for keyboard-only navigation.