Open Source ®™© user friendliness
In firefox 1.5, the user interface was changed so that
- [home] and [end] don't work any more. You need to do [ctrl] (or [alt] -- I already forget) [home] or [?][end] to jump to the start or end of a page.
- Uparrow and downarrow? Forget it.
- [pageup] and [pagedown] sometimes take you up a screenful or down a screenful. They also sometimes take you to the top or bottom of the webpage and just noisily refresh the screen when you hit them again.
- Using the mouse to navigate inside a textbox? Sure. Remember that the arrow pointer is at the bottom of the little grabbing hand, not the top like it is everywhere else.
- And what's this nonsense of putting up little select bars besides text and graphics objects if you use the mouse to select focus on a webpage?
- Oh, and I mustn't forget the dumb little "we're having trouble connecting to this website. Try again?" alert box that 1.5 spits up when it can't connect to a website.
The firefox people claim that 1.5 has better keyboard support. If "better" means "completely reworked so it doesn't work like any other web browser including firefox 0.01 through 1.0.7", why, yes, it does.
Now, I really like the extension support in firefox; being able to block ads is worth firefox being twice to three times as slow as internet explorer (and when you're running Linux, which is no great speed demon itself, you can't even get IE) and firefox generally has a better approach to the missing media player feature (IE spits up alert box after alert box pestering you to install whatever useless spyware and exploits show up, while firefox just puts up a [completely uninformative, but inobtrusive]) alert line at the top of the screen. But the stupid nonsense of changing the user interface so doesn't work like anything else? Pffft on that. If I have to play "hunt the user interface" to use firefox, I'll use IE or Safari and set up a big honking proxy server to sanitize webpages before they reach my browser.
At least I can still get to 1.0.7 via the mozilla ftp site, so it was simply a matter of uninstalling 1.5 and putting back the old, obsolete, but working version that I used to use. And now the keyboard commands work again!
Comments
Good question. I tend to go to [tools]->[options]->[advanced], then set
And that keeps the evil tabs down to a dull roar. I suspect that to completely dump tabs would require a little bit of work with a software machete.
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Perhaps most important of all, is there a way to turn off the blasted tabbed browsing once you've enabled it? Am I in the minority, David, in finding tabbed browsing an annoyance?