[Wolves] Fri^WSaturday Fun

[Zeth Green]

> Name a program that by choice or fate, you rely on. List three aspects
> of it that you like most and three that annoy you most. Finally give a
> verdict - overall, do you love it or hate it.

Firefox is by fate rather than choice. Except that it is called "Bon
Echo" in Gentoo (for the same reason it is IceWeasel in Debian).

Loves

1. Extensions - the sheer quality and quantity of the community
produced extensions is why I use it more than the otherwise better
Epiphany or Konqueror.

2. Many technical Windows users have been exposed to Firefox so they
can migrate to Linux and still use the Web as before. Even an all
Microsoft shop, that is otherwise completely clueless about Linux, can
test their web services against Win32 Firefox and have a pretty good
idea whether they will work on alternate platforms or not.

3. It renders pages very well. So much so that web is being slowly
recreated in Gecko's image.

Hates

1. It has gotten a bit better recently but still seems alien to my
Desktop, far less integrated than all the other web browsers available
for Linux. They also seem to have broken the bookmarks bar in Firefox
2 so you cannot easily rearrange the bookmarks by just dragging them
around anymore.

2. It is not very intelligent, especially the annoying dialogs, most
of which could be removed if the program just recorded system data
properly. For example, if you want to just quit the application and
get on with your life, and you close multiple tabs, Firefox often
records that as a crash and asks you whether you want to restore your
previous session.

3. Okay it is quite rare, but it does sometimes genuinely crash.
Making it the least stable application on my Desktop (give or take
Nautilus which I avoid in favour of the terminal).

On my work machine recently, I had Gmail open in a tab somewhere and
someone attempted to chat to me through Gmail's included Javascript
chat applet, crashing Firefox and losing all my open tabs. Really
annoying since I was using a CMS in a different tab.

Of course the web is a complicated business, Firefox cannot track
every site or know what some webpage or Java applet is going to do.
However, if rendering one webpage goes really wrong then it takes all
of the tabs and windows with it. It should instead use some kind of
subprocess management, and when something goes wrong it just kills the
subprocess.

Best Wishes,
Zeth

On 27/01/07, Alex Willmer <alex at moreati.org.uk> wrote:
> PS To fellow PyWM members. Would it come across as too trollish to post

No it is a good post. PyWM's troll threshold is pretty high anyway!