Technorama

Firefox 3 is now released, I've written up a list of the fixes I'd still like to see, to make the browser it deserves to be:

Form buttons that don't "click" properly, and end up just looking like they've been highlighted.

Option to stop sites disabling scroll bars, and block detection of any right clicks.

A decent sized window resize on lower right hand corner (This could just be Ubuntu/KDE/GTK bug).

URL completion doesn't work from the character after http, currently I have to type https:// before it will offer me mail.google.com. At least it offers the SSL site from the history when I just enter mail.google.com.

Some passwords aren't saved always (http/s ones), currently every once in a while I need to log in to my netgear router, but sometimes Firefox doesn't populate the password fields, even though they are stored passwords! AutoAuth is one workaround for a few of the cases :)

Save Page button that I've commented on before. Currently needs a way to save the page as a PDF file!

Quicker (or configurable) time-out on loading iframes, images etc from hosts which are down. let the rest of the page load. The problem is visible on any google cache of a site where the site is presently offline and the iframes/images still try and load!

Native support for common image types like TIFF which is still missing despite many sites using TIFF files in the IMG tag.

When a webmaster embeds an MP3 or Vorbis file into a browser page using the EMBED or OBJECT tag this gives an error if the mimetype isn't supported. The error is at the top of the page "Click here to download plugin.", and there is the green jigsaw icon where the embedded file is. The green jigsaw icon is not ideal, a download link would be much nicer, e.g. "Embedded file not supported, click here to download", or be able to right click on the jigsaw icon and download it is another option. Workaround at present is to delve into the HTML and try and figure out the src URL, or if not generated by JavaScript try and get it from the Page Info (Ctrl+I doesn't work in recent Firefox unfortunately). If there is an EMBED error, my feeling is Firefox should display the mime-type, or a string describing the mime-type so we know it is a "Windows Media Video" file etc, without having to go through the plugin detection wizard to find what format it is.

Unfortunately links stop working on a page the moment we click one, so even though the new page hasn't loaded, all the page is still readable, and links clickable, but none of the links work! Often we click a link, then see another, but we can't middle-click it to open in an additional tab, as would be handy :)

Firefox3 is great as it is though, a great development from Netscape and Mozilla Suite which went before :)

Labels: Firefox, Future, GNU+Linux