joeysmith's Journal: A few sidenotes about Mozilla

Did you realize that you can add support for new protocols by means of a simple piece of javascript? Take a look at how the guys at CNRI added support for the "hdl" protocol to mozilla. It probably won't work out of the box for you (the installer code is quite old), but pull down the zip file and take a look at the components it installs. I'm duly impressed.

On the other hand, I can't think of anything I dislike so much as the steaming pile of excrement that firefox has become as of 0.9. Menus are changed around again (Edit -> Preferences?! Didn't we all just go over what a BAD BAD place that was for this stuff? Why has it gone back to such an obscure location?). The Qute theme may not be everyone's favorite, but I abhor the idea of making everything look like OS X. And why has the default size of the toolbar gone up by something like 50%? It's now not only an eyesore, but an eyesore that takes up a good 1/4 of the available real estate on these K-Mart special LCD screens we have here.

Where have all the extensions gone? I had a bunch here, just a moment ago...a bunch that moved with me from 0.7 -> 0.8 just fine...now they're gone. Why do I still have to install an extension to get a close box on each tab? Will the Firefox team ever actually look at what people are doing with the browser, or will they continue to produce releases from their Romero-like caves?

Ugh...and most annoying of all? I can't middle-click to "paste+navigate to" URLs anymore. That was one of the single best features firefox had...the only thing I'd rate higher is tabbed browsing.

Here's to being able to both admire and despise the same group of guys, and to being able to fix what I don't like.