[Gllug] Guardian says Firefox is rubbish

[Tethys]

--------

Rob Crowther writes:

>> 1. You can only run it once at a time,
>
>Add -no-remote to your shortcut and you can run it as many times as you 
>have profiles.

But I don't want that. I want to run it multiple times on the same
machine with the same profile. I can give you two concrete examples
to when this is desirable:

Situation 1: I've left myself logged in to my desktop, with firefox
up and running. I'm out and about somewhere, and want to check
something. So I ssh into my home machine, start up firefox, knowing
that the page containing the info I'm looking for is already handily
accessible via my bookmarks. Oh. No it's not. Firefox won't start,
because there's another instance already running on the same machine
(but on a different X server). Note that it doesn't even give you the
option of creating a new profile at that point -- it just doesn't
start at all. So I have to try and remember the mystic incantation
to get it to give me a new profile, at which point, it will actually
start. Only I no longer have the bookmark I was looking for.

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.)

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.

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.

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

Tet
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