mcgrew's Journal: WTF, Firefox???

As usual when I boot on Patch Tuesday, I open a bunch of tabs, the notebook slows to a crawl, and this time it was locked up so tight that Windows gave a message saying it couldn't display the message and to use the power button. I had to pull the battery to reboot the damned thing.

So I start Firefox back up and it says it's updating. It finally opens, with an extra tab, one telling me that it changed my default search to Yahoo.

WHAT THE GOD DAMNED HELL, FIREFOX??? This is bullshit! If I wanted that God damned Yahoo, an even worse search engine than Bing, I would have chosen it.

Yahoo, when your product is so shitty you have to trick people into using it... fucking morons!

There used to be a drop down by the search box; it's gone now. I tried tools->options; that's where it is now. Non nerds would give up.

Pissing off your users is NOT the way to get more of them. Anybody have any suggestions for a less annoying browser?

Also, I need to dig out that kubuntu CD and load it on a thumb drive; I'm damned sick and tired of Microsoft's patch Tuesday.

Excuse me while I reboot. Again.

Simple fix

[BarbaraHudson]

1. Click on the magnifying glass on the left side of the search box.
2. Click on "Change search settings".
3. Select your new default search engine.

OR

1. Click on the "Open Menu" icon on the far right of the toolbar.
2. Click "Options"
3. Click "Search"
4. Select your new default search engine.

They DID say it would be easy to change the default, and it is. HTH.

Ability to un-do is no excuse for forced change

[DutchUncle]

I don't want a program update of *any* program changing my existing settings. This would be considered a stop-ship defect in the embedded systems that i work on, and I consider it a defect in any program I use. (Defaulting *new* settings for *new* features is different.)

Re:

[mcgrew]

Exactly. You simply don't change settings on someone else's computer unless they ask you to.

Be careful with ubuntu 14.x

[damn_registrars]

I learned the hard way that both 14.04 and 14.10 brought in a couple of really awful wifi drivers. Cards that work beautifully (both intel and non-intel wifi chips [including some realtek chips amongst others]) in 13.10 and earlier are sporadic at best in the driver firmwares that ship by default in these releases.

The rest of the stuff that people bitch about so incessantly in newer versions of ubuntu are just pissing matches by comparison.

Re:

[fustakrakich]

Funny, Slackware has none of these issues, unless, I suppose, I use the latest version Firefox. But they still include Netscape. Firefox was made for advertisers and should avoided, along with Chrome of course.

Seamonkey... The one and only

[fustakrakich]

Use no other. And switch back to Slack while you're at it :-) Their upgrade cycles are nice and slow, giving you lots of time to tweak everything just right...

You did see the front page news that Firefox switched to Yahoo one or two versions ago, right?

Re:

[mcgrew]

I expected that new installs would have Yahoo as the default, but I didn't expect them to change settings on already installed and configured browsers. Nobody with any brains or ethics changes settings on someone else's computer without permission. It's just wrong.