This list of top ten Firefox browser annoyances is perhaps the lamest thing I’ve read all year, even using the how-low-can-you-go bar that I assign to anything published in the Inquirer. No splash screen? No IM client? The Thunderbird e-mail client needs a new name? These are “some of the key problems … in Firefox”? It’s truly a shame that American English doesn’t have a word that’s equivalent to wanker. It would really come in handy here.
(Via Prof. Froomkin)
Ed Bott 
Wanker seems to me to be an appropriate description. Does it really matter that we didn’t invent the term?
I use Firefox and I am a happy customer …even though I paid nothing for so much work.
The guy at the Inquirer is entitled to express his opinion ….infact I often seek out non mainstream viewpoints for some balance, especially with religion, politics and PC hype.
I will now read these articles more often …thanks for the link!!
The nicest feature of FF is the way to make huge fonts which I use regularly to assist with reading from a small screen nearly 2 feet away from my eyes.
Also firefox does a good job with pop ups and trackers et al.
jp
Why doesn’t your comment form like my e-mail address? (nicholas@pdsys_org) [I honestly don’t know. I’ve become very aggressive about comment spam lately, given that I get 5,000+ attempts a week to spam this site. Sorry you got caught in the net. I’ve restored the e-mail address and will test to see what happened. – Ed]
I like FireFox, and love the concept/idea of it.. but I think it should have been more polished before being “hyped” to the masses.
The patch process is a joke– I had a friend running a .8 version of FireFox, and didn’t even know there was updates available. Another friend who just installed 1.0.1, didn’t notice the red update icon for weeks. And downloading the installation package all over again is not a “patch”, it’s re-installing.
There are still issues with FireFox’s extensions– you don’t know what they are really doing. You can easily install an extension that freezes your FireFox on start, either intentionally or unintentionally– you can have extensions conflicting with each other, or slowing down your browser significantly. The extensions are free to contact the net, even pausing/stalling FireFox when they cannot connect (this happens a lot with the SwitchProxy extension, because the author’s homepage goes up and down.) FireFox should give feedback on what an extension is doing, how it’s installed, and how it is interacting with the other extensions.
There are threading issues with FireFox– try opening up multiple copies quickly, through DDE and through the command line. You’ll no doubt end up with “ghost” windows, that look like a regular FireFox window, yet have the green update arrow directly to the right of “Help”, and are frozen. You cannot enter any URLs, or perform any actions, except closing the browser.
These are just a few of my complaints, and if they want to play with the “big boys” they need to get on the ball. Yes, it’s a free browser, but they’re aiming at taking down IE.. and that’s going to be a difficult task if they can’t even get the simple things right.
The author’s disclaimer is pretty funny though, about not wanting to be burned at the stake like Fred Langa has been over his article. Only users who treat software as religion get upset at bug and flaw report info. Report it to the software’s developers, let’s work on a fix and move on. His whole “Thunderchicken” point was just irrelevant.
Its funny, because when people comment that it’s “not ready to take on the big boys,” they never fully understand that it took 6 iterations of IE to get it right, and it’s still not perfect. I hardly thing IE is one of the ‘big boys’ technically-wise, other than the fact that it’s part of every Windows installation.
i think “dick-head” would be a fair enough comparison to “wanker”. 🙂
I am a Brit living in the USA. May I suggest a few alternatives for wanker, mainly BritEnglish but one or two AmerEnglish:
Tosser, Tosspot, Dipstick or Plonker (both from a Bristish sitcom called Only Fools and Horses, Jerk-off, Knobhead…
My first browser was Lynx, ’cause that’s all there was, at the time. Since then, I think I’ve used, pretty well, every browser available for both Windoze and Linux. While there’s room for improvement and likely always will be, FF is, IMNSHO, the best of the bunch.
Since Bill Gates made it possible for any idiot to use a computer, it seems most of them are and they’re, probably, best off to stick with M$IE ’til FF becomes more “polished”. 8-þ
I have a big one. Firefox — and all other browsers outside of IE — doesn’t seem to be able to handle secure Corporate Intranet sites with networked applications yet. I guess it could be because the folks who set up these for their corporations design them around IE and aren’t interesed in testing other software. It really sucks because I would love to use Firefox or Mozilla at work but even though many things work OK, I come to 2 or 3 tasks a day where I have to use IE to get it to work.
It also seems to screw with Windows explorer after using it on the secure sites for a while. Then I get seriously annoyed! I actually don’t know if it does this on computers where you don’t access secure Intranets because I haven’t tried it at home.