[Gllug] Guardian says Firefox is rubbish

[Nix]

On 8 Jul 2008, Tethys told this:
> Situation 2: I'm running firefox on one machine. I go to another
> machine elsewhere in the house and log in. I go to start up firefox.
> It incorrectly tells me that firefox is already running. Yes, it is
> running, but not on this box. But because my home directory is NFS
> mounted, it thinks it is because something in the other instance has
> crapped in ~/.mozilla (or ~/.firefox or whatever). Again, it gives
> me no opportunity to select another profile, nor is that what I want
> to do anyway, as it would lose me the useful bits I wanted to use
> (my bookmarks, stored passwords, cookies etc.)

I'll agree wit hthis...

> Profiles are a *really* stupid idea, at least in the way they've been
> implemented in firefox. Both problems are caused by moronic firefox
> developers (presumably from a Windows background) making assumptions
> that you have one user per machine, and that apps running on a given
> machine will all be displaying on the same physical monitor. That's
> just not the way I use my machines, nor have I done so for the last
> 20 years. In the past, you used to be able to run multiple Netscape
> instances simultaneously. Sadly, those days seem to be gone.

... and with this. (Fittingly, JWZ has also ranted about exactly this.)

> As another rant, firefox developers have given no thought to backward
> compatibility. So for example, I installed ff3 on my girlfriend's new
> machine, and ran it to test it out. Having run it once, I was then
> screwed when going back to my own machine. My bookmarks had vanished
> (ff3 had converted the bookmarks file to an sqlite database), half of
> the extensions I was using no longer worked -- ff3 had disabled them
> because they weren't ff3 compatible, and there's no option to tell
> firefox that no, I'm not using ff3 any more.

Um, `cp -a .mozilla .mozilla-old' first?

The *right* thing to do is to have versioned .mozilla-... directories
and have FF make a new one when it needs to, but let's face it: no
*other* Unix programs do that: they all transparently update user
configs where required (except for Emacs, where the `user config' is far
too complex and where having Emacs itself mess with it leads to user
rebellions) and they never provide a downgrade mechanism.  (KDE even has
a specialized service just for handling config file updates, and not
even it handles downgrades again.)

> Face it, firefox is crap. It's just that it's the best we have right
> now :-(

Konqueror would beg to differ, as would WebKit (which is of course
KHTML+KJS-Qt, thus Konqueror in a different suit and without most of
the really cool embeddability).
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