Firefox 3 hits RC1 – stupid design decisions

I’ve been using FF3 and FF2 in parallel for the last month, and FF3 has some cool features that definitely make life better. The most noticeable so far is the new address-bar, which has finally been dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Until now, it was still using the very very basic (and > 15 years old) system of when you start typing a URL, a plain list of potential textual matches comes up with rather arbitrary sorting AND only matching if the URL starts with IDENTICAL letters as you’ve typed.

NB: this post is mainly to give a kick up the ass to those of you who “haven’t noticed” yet that Firefox 3 is available and that it kicks ass, and that you should switch to using it ASAP ;).

e.g. if you type “t-mac” into the address bar, http://t-machine.org would show up in the list of potential matches, but http://server.t-machine.org would not. Argh!

Now, though, it’s got fantastically juicy – it gives you:

• the page icon
• the page title – i.e. the human-readable title, which is ESPECIALLY useful for very long URLs, e.g. for websites with many articles, only one of which you’re trying to find
• it searches ANYWHERE within the URL
• it searches ANYWHERE within the title

I cannot over-estimate how valuable that last point is. Most of the time, if you half-remember a site you went to, you can remember the title *or at least part of it*. Rarely can you remember the URL. Very rarely can you remember the first few letters of the URL (you have to be EXACTLY correct with previous versions of FF and with internet explorer).

Stupid design decisions

But … I’m also being bitten by some downright stupid design decisions, most of which have only resurfaced today with the RC1 release (previously I was using the beta release, which for some reason didn’t have these design flaws / bugs). They’re small – and yet the improvements (like the one I explained above) are also small: the point is that with a browser the distinguishing features tend to be “small but surprisingly effective” and that flows both ways. These “quirks” of FF3 are extremely annoying if you’ve become used to the far superior (in tiny ways) user interface of FF2 or even (in some rare case) of MSIE.

First up, you can no longer open a new window in FF3. When you hit Ctrl-N to open a window, you *have* to open a webpage. Previous behaviour in FF2 was that you had a config option to select “open a webpage”, “open a copy of the page you’re currently viewing” or “open a blank page”.

There are two reasons for wanting that last option: firstly, it’s faster – there is no delay to wait for a page load. This I suspect is why FF3 has removed this feature: it now loads pages MUCH faster than any other browser – noticeably, visually faster! This is wonderful. I suspect (I haven’t checked yet – unfortunately, unlike most open source developers, the FF team don’t do per-version release notes for their software, which means they only way to check is to go digging through their bug tracker. Ugh. Argh) someone decided this was the ONLY reason for that option, and now that FF3 is faster, they decided to remove it.

The second reason? So that you can type your address into the address bar *instantly*.

But, even better, since FF has long supported typing google searches *directly* into the address bar (you don’t even have to click on the google search bar to the right), with a blank window you can actually go “ctrl-n [type google search with at least one space in between words] enter” and you get an instant google search for literally only two extra keypresses (ctrl, and N).

If you set the new window page to be blank, FF3 instead rather stupidly forces you to use their custom homepage, which is not only a little slower to load than a blank page but far, far worse it grabs your keyboard cursor AFTER the page is loaded, and puts it in a search box at the middle. If you hit ctrl-n and start typing, you will get a few characters in the address bar, and the rest in their search box. This is a side-effect of the way that HTML defines javascript actions. But it’s been commonly known for, oh, 10 years or so, so it’s hard to imagine that the FF3 authors didn’t notice it :).

Next problem: You can’t run any files that you download

In FF2, at least the version I was running, when you tried to run a file that you clicked on in a webpage, it would wait 2 seconds before allowing you to click the “run” button, to protect you from accidentally clicking a link and then hitting enter (or accidentally double-clicking AND being unlucky enough to get your mouse in the way of where the “run” option would happen to popup on screen), or from a webpage’s javascript automatically triggering a download of a file at the same time as you were typing, with the co-incidence that the Run option appeared just a fraction of a second before you hit the enter button.

Now … you just aren’t allowed to.

This is *not* a security improvement. It’s about effective as telling your users they have to memorize 30-digit passwords composed enitrely of random numbers (most of them will write it down on a post-it note and keep it stuck to their monitor): you are forcing your userbase to do something less secure than they would have if you hadn’t bothered in the first place.

You can hack around it by downloading OpenDownload. NB: this plugin could have a virus in, or any number of malicious side-effects. I have no idea: but the FF 3 authors have forced me to use it by removing the Run feature. Use at your own risk (but bear in mind that vast numbers of web users *are* using it, in desperation and frustration). Sigh.

Finally … most plugins haven’t been updated to officially support FF3 yet. Tragically, it seems many plugins *don’t need updating*, it’s just that FF3’s overly-protective “won’t alllow you to install a plugin unless the author manually updates the source code to SPECIFICALLY state they’ve tested it with FF3” means that you can’t use many of them *even though they are perfectly fine*. This is especially the case with the large number of plugins that are no longer actively maintained because they “just work” and don’t *need* any maintenance or new versions.

This aspect of plugins is very difficult in general, for all software apps, so I understand FF team’s decision here. It’s just a pity there wasn’t a smoother path found. I was particularly narked though that I’ve seen a couple of plugins that work with FF3 beta, but NOT with FF3 RC1 (the new version launched today). Surely that’s a mistake?