Firefox, you're starting to turn into a love/hate relationship
by Joel Aufrecht 12:36 PM, 17 Mar 2009
I've been a huge fan of Firefox since it was Firebird 0.7, or whatever the heck it used to be called. On Windows, IE is just a gaping security hole, and since I switched to a Linux desktop, not even an option. The web that I browse bears little relation to the one I see casual computer users interact with: I see hardly any advertisements, and monkeys don't jump around on my screen singing songs about products I can buy. But the last year or so, and the last few months has been taking a toll on my satisfaction with Firefox:
  • Firefox 3.0.6 and later crashes abruptly, without warning or obvious trigger, multiple times per day. On the bright side, it crashes instantaneously and restarts in well under a minute, remembering all of my tabs, so I usually don't lose anything more than a minute. I just lose my sense of security and comfort, and get distracted into tangents like this post.
  • The file open dialog is hideous. I shudder every time I have to attach a file, because this window comes up and has broken auto-complete. I'm not a big tree-clicking person; I prefer to just type the full path where my file is. But the Firefox file open dialog (some people say it's actually the GTK dialog, but even the bug reports are fuzzy) waits for you to type a few letters, then guesses what you are going to type, then erases the letters you are still typing, so that you have a path that's simply nonsense letters. It's actually sensitive to how fast you type. This is the sort of bug that I thought was left in the last millenium, but it seems to have resurfaced in Firefox over the last year and it sucks.
  • Did I mention that it's crashing multiple times per day? I even down-graded back to 3.0.3, and it's still crashing. WTF?
  • The certificate dialog. When you go to a website that has encryption, but didn't pay the encryption cartel for the privilege, you have to navigate through a series of obscure dialogs that, if you know what you are doing, are a silly waste of time, and if you don't, are very unlikely to help you. You have to click, in sequence, like this:
    1. a hyperlink: "Or you can add an exception ..."
    2. a button: "Add Exception ..." (your other option is "Get me out of here!", which is an utterly bad choice of words: please do not put informal idioms in the user interface of globally used software. Some of us won't understand it, and the rest will just roll our eyes every fracking time we have to see it.)
    3. a button: "Get Certificate"
    4. a button: "Confirm Security Exception"
  • Now that it's crashing so often, I am noticing that the first time I input a URL in the address bar, the whole browser freezes for five or ten seconds while it does some eldritch ritual. Awesome.
Firefox is amazing in many ways, but there seem to have been a lot of mis-steps and poor decisions piling up recently.
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TV Theory
by Joel Aufrecht 02:22 AM, 17 Mar 2009
I haven't had a TV in many years, but I do watch a few shows. Currently I'm watching BSG and How I Met Your Mother. Both of these shows happen to follow the current trend in TV: story arcs spanning multiple episodes and even seasons, combined with slow exploration of mysteries. With only one episode of BSG to go, and absolutely no trend of revelation in HIMYM, the obvious resolution just occured to me: Ted is going to marry Starbuck.
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