I don't like Firefox 2.0

[Doan the Nado]

So I just updated my Firefox from 1.5 to 2.0 today, and so far, I don't like it. Sure, it looks better and it has all kinds of features that I'll never use, but it removes key functionality and makes dumb changes to things that I use on a day-to-day basis.

1. I like to see long web pages easily, so I have moved every button I use into the menu bar (back, forward, refresh, stop, home, bookmarks; a few very common bookmarks, and my location bar), right next to the "..., Tools, Help" buttons. This means that my location bar isn't all that wide, and the new version added a Go button that I never use which takes up valuable space up there. I had to do a good amount of searching to figure out that if you go to about:config, you can search for "hideGoButton" and change this preference. Still, a pretty big annoyance.

2. Ctrl-K. This is the most important feature of Firefox, in my opinion, and they screwed it up. In 1.5, if you take the search bar out of your menu, pressing Ctrl-K brings up a dialog box. Here, I type my search query, press Enter, and voila! The results are there in a new tab. In 2.0, pressing Ctrl-K loads a search engine into your current tab. This is very annoying behavior that I haven't yet found out how to fix. Of course, I could press Ctrl-T, Ctrl-K to open a tab and then go to a search page, but why should functionality be removed?

3. In-page searching. In 1.5, you can press / to begin searching, and it finds as you type. But what if there is a non-important match near the top of the page? Easy: press Alt-N to proceed to the next match. This does not work in 2.0, and I haven't yet figured out what they have changed it to, or if the feature is even available any more.

That's all I've come across so far, but I've only been using it for about an hour, maybe. These things are really bothering me about the new FF, as I'm just wondering why no one thought about these things before changing things that I thought most people used on a frequent basis.

If anyone has found solutions to these problems, let me know. If you just want to rant, that's fine, too. ;D


EDIT: I just found a fix for #3. Add the following to your chrome/userChrome.css:

#FindToolbar > *
{
display: -moz-box;
}

[NASH7777]

I have firefox...I never use it. Safari always does the trick for me.

[thetruecoolness]

Well for #3 I know if you just start typing without some kind of text entry field in focus it does quick search, which I believe is what you were referring to. How to get it to goto the next one is F3 apparently (just found that out as I know F3 is find next in a lot of other applications).

But yeah though the spell check is nice I really don't like how they changed the tabs, but luckily I found some good extensions to make them work like 1.5. The addon is Tabbrowser Preferences. I also am partial to PageStyle2Tab which takes the background color and foreground color of the body tag of the page, and makes the tab follow those, so if you visit different styles pages they're easy to tell apart.

As for #2 I'm not sure, but it would seem there would be someway to jump to the search bar up that is default by the address bar, hmm. Actually it seems if you have the little search bar on the topbar of the program, Ctrl-K goes there instead of loading the default search engine in the page.

[vespuleth]

I agree with Brandon. I downloaded it a few days ago, and haven't had a lot of time to mess with it, but I think it was a sacrifice of functionality for 'pretties' sake. The entire feel of it is fairly foreign. And I echo Doan's 'search' complaints. bah.

[Doan the Nado]

thetruecoolness said:

Well for #3 I know if you just start typing without some kind of text entry field in focus it does quick search, which I believe is what you were referring to. How to get it to goto the next one is F3 apparently (just found that out as I know F3 is find next in a lot of other applications).

This depends on if you have that option set under Accessibility. I do not: on many Unix programs, / is search, so I am really used to pressing that. The code that I mentioned in my first post makes it just like it used to be, so I have that solved now. I didn't try F3, that probably would have been a good idea, but I don't typically use the F-keys, so I'm not sure if that would have been too convenient, anyways.

But yeah though the spell check is nice I really don't like how they changed the tabs, but luckily I found some good extensions to make them work like 1.5. The addon is Tabbrowser Preferences. I also am partial to PageStyle2Tab which takes the background color and foreground color of the body tag of the page, and makes the tab follow those, so if you visit different styles pages they're easy to tell apart.

I actually changed the Tab close buttons to the way they used to be, too. It's one of the options in about:config, although I can't remember which, at the moment. The best argument I found regarding this is that if you want to close the tab you're currently using, it makes the most sense to just go to the upper right. If the close buttons are on each tab, you have to hunt for that tab among all the tabs to figure out where to go to close it. Yeah, Ctrl-W works just as easily, but sometimes I like to just kick back and use just the mouse. The different color tabs sound pretty cool, but personally, I don't use too many add-ons...

As for #2 I'm not sure, but it would seem there would be someway to jump to the search bar up that is default by the address bar, hmm. Actually it seems if you have the little search bar on the topbar of the program, Ctrl-K goes there instead of loading the default search engine in the page.

Yeah, Ctrl-K does do that, but if you customize your toolbar to remove the Search box from it, then what does Ctrl-K do? In 1.5, it brings up a dialog box where you can type your search, and then there's an option to have the results opened in a new tab, and this is what I did. In 2.0, it loads a specified page into your current tab. This is total crap, and I still haven't figured out how to change it. For one thing, it has become habit, when I'm reading a page and see something I'm interested in finding more info on, to simply type Ctrl-K, type in what I'm looking for, hit Enter, and then then go back to what I was reading. I can still do that, but now I have to add a Ctrl-T to the beginning of the whole deal, and old habits are hard to break.

The second thing I don't like about the new behavior is that it requires two separate page loads: first the search engine loads in my browser, then I have to send the Get query back so that the search results page can reload. The old way removes that first step.

Anyway, I recently searched for how to remove some of the menu items I don't use. I really only use File, Edit, and Tools (and I left Help, too), but I removed all of the other buttons from the menu (such as History, View, etc). Since all of my browser stuff is in this same toolbar (the only toolbar I have), my URL bar is now much wider, so I might add the Search bar back at the top right. I believe that if I do that, I can set the openintab option to true in about:config to make the results open in a new tab, and then I should have my old functionality back.

I still don't think it's right that I have to muck around in about:config and in userChrome.css just to make my browser have the features that I liked from the old version.