cos: (0)
cos ([personal profile] cos) wrote in [personal profile] gilana 2006-02-15 03:05 pm (UTC)

buggy firefox

1.5 is reasonably stable, which is a big improvement, but it still has some serious leaks. If I leave it running for a week, it can get very unweildy and sluggish and I need to quit it. I'm used to leaving browsers running for a long time.

It's got user interface problems. The biggest one is that I can't consistently scroll web pages up and down with the arrow keys. Once I click inside a page, arrow keys just move a cursor in it. PgUp and PgDn also mostly don't work. This lack of comfortable keyboard scolling alone is a big enough problem to make Firefox effectively not usable for me. But there are lots of smaller usability problems, like having to use a click-drag-unclick to close a tab, instead of a simple click. Very annoying. And data entry into web forms is getting better, but is still poorly designed. For example, if I'm typing text in one field, and I click the mouse on another text field, I want a cursor active in that other field right away. Firefox takes it as a generic click outside current field, and merely ends data entry on the current field without switching to the one I clicked on.

Then there's a host of little bugs. For example:
- When I first start Firefox, it often doesn't fully work - most menus are missing, and the URL bar doesn't accept keyboard input - until I switch to some other app or to Finder and then back to Firefox.
- Sometimes when I look at a pulldown menu, either from Firefox's bookmarks or from a web form, after I close the menu, the space it occupied on the screen goes blank (white), and stays that way even if I load a new page, move the Firefox window, or close Firefox entirely. I need to re-open the same menu and re-close it 1, 2, or 3 more times, until it properly replaces the blank area with what was supposed to be there.

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