Flashes of Panic

The reason I post so much about Firefox is that I assume that most people reading are among the 90% of the world that uses Windows, where Firefox is your best choice. But as I’ve mentioned, I’m primarily a Macintosh user (how about those sweet new iMacs, huh?), and in the browser market, for once, that means more options. Since I hopped to OS X I’ve moved from IE to Camino 0.7 to Safari as my primary browser. (Doing web development, I need to keep them all around for testing.)

Last week I switched to Firefox 0.9.3 as my primary browser, and it has been a rocky change. Page rendering is just fine; any speed differences are too small for me to notice. But there are still some usability pros and cons.

Pro:

• I can go directly to the Runner’s World website, which is still frustratingly difficult in Safari, even though I’ve been telling them about the problem since April.
• Site icons work across the board; they’re patchy in Safari.
• FF has a JavaScript console which makes debugging sketchy JS a lot easier.
• I can choose my search engine from the search window in the toolbar.

Cons:

• Links from other applications open as new windows, not new tabs. Camino lets me open them in new tabs, as does Safari, and I vastly prefer this behavior; I open a lot of links from my aggregator or my email, so Firefox makes it hard for me to keep the number of open windows under control.
• There doesn’t seem to be a keyboard shortcut for “go to home page” as there is in Camino and Safari.
• There’s something weird about scrolling. If I page down, the whole thing flickers, and sometimes I see a horizontal section of page about an inch high repeated down the whole window before it snaps into focus.
• There’s no go-away icon on the tabs, so I can’t click once on a tab to close it. (I know, I could use splat-W to close the current tab, but I’m pretty thoroughly trained to consider that “Close the window and all tabs in it.”)

These are pretty tame, all things considered. I could (and probably should) page through Bugzilla and figure out where to send this feedback directly to the project, but for the most part, Bugzilla is an intimidating maze to me.

In the meantime, I wonder if I should switch over (back?) to Camino (now 0.8) as my primary browser, since it shares none of these problems with Mozilla, and all of the features (except the JavaScript console.)

Update (9/3): Jeremy posted a similar list of annoyances.

Now playing: Alleluia from The Honesty Room by Dar Williams