What I don’t like about FireFox
Posted Wednesday, November 30th 2005
I’m a huge supporter of Mozilla Firefox. There’s no doubt about it. As a web-junkie and a web developer, I absolutely adore it’s compliance with standards and it’s high level of security. But there are some things about it that keep on bugging me.
And let me get this out of the way right now - I’m not attacking Firefox. I’m merely pointing out a few issues that have bugged me before and still keep bugging me. And a note to all of you Firefox and Open Source zealots - this is a personal point of view. If you don’t like it - well, that’s your problem. I have nothing against Firefox and/or open source.
First of all, I hate the lack of customizability in Firefox. I am an avid supporter of Maxthon simply because you can customize the interface completely. It’s easy to add, remove & modify buttons, items from context menus, bars, etc. In Firefox, customizability is extremely limited. And yes, I know there are extensions - but that’s the point. Some of the options available in extensions should be built in the browser itself. I mean, the Ffox developers should take the hint, and take the top 5, or 10 extensions that probably 90% of Firefox users use, and build them INTO the browser. Extensions such as AdBlock, Tabbrowser Extensions, Tab Mix Plus, etc, all offer customizability that should be in Firefox by default. Why should I download extensions for functionality that should come as standard?
“Out-of-the-box” customizability would help other things too. For example, I hate installing a new version of Firefox, only to be informed that half of my installed extensions are no longer supported and that they don’t work. Excellent.
I just downloaded Firefox 1.5. And I’m not entirely happy with it. For example, the tab context menu has two new options on it - ‘Bookmark This Tab’ & ‘Bookmark All Tabs’. Now, while I do see how these are usefull things, I don’t like how they chose to include them in the browser. For one thing, who was the genius that decided to include those options under the ‘Close Tab’ option? I’m used to doing right-click->Close Tab. And yes, I know I can middle click on the tab to close it, but I’m just used to right-clicking on the tab and selecting the close tab option. Which was always the last option, and hence, the movement became mechanical over time. And there’s no way to move these new options on the context menu, or remove them altogether. There’s even no option for something as simple as removing the ‘Go’ button from the address toolbar. It has to be done manually.
Which brings me to another thing - changes in the interface. Anyone that has done any application development will tell you that end-users don’t like changes. At least to the user interface. Users will become used to a certain way of doing things, and any change becomes irritating. The options menu in Firefox used to be vertically-navigated. Now it’s horizontal. Hurray for confusion!
The application should conform to the users, not the other way around.
Firefox is a great browser. It truly is. But by doing simple, not properly though out mistakes, they’re pushing users away.
Me? I’ll keep using it. I just hope that it becomes a bit more user-friendly in future releases.
