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CUSTOM_FIRE

                                             August 03, 2013


The central virtue of Firefox is it's customizability.
The wide range of plug-ins are very interesting,
the Edit-Preferences menus have some nice touches,
and the about:config menu has still more.

The vision here is software that empowers the user,
that let's you set-up an application that works the
way you want it to.


They've never done a good job of following
through on this vision: if you actually use
the customizations (even the supposedly
approved and supported ones in
Edit-Preferences), you can expect everything
to be subtly out-of-whack, if not out-right
broken.  (And have fun filing a bug report.
That's all you'll get out of it.)

In the early days, there was an interesting
phenomena of plug-ins breaking on upgrade
like clockwork.  (Consistent API?  What's that?
Backwards compatibility?  Huh?)

   They appear to have largely solved that
   problem... and have decided it's cool
   to do forced upgrades, pushing UI changes
   whenever they feel the impulse.
                                        
       This invariably makes me angry,       
       and I'd like to know why this is      
       regarded as so strange these          
       days... every software project        
       claims the right to blast changes     
       at you at their whim.                 
                                                   
       I have no problem with experimenting        
       with new UI, but I want to do it at my      
       convienience, when I feel I have the         I have a particular gripe
       time to do it.  Having menu items jump       about the "Bookmark All
       around when you're trying to get             Tabs" feature, which kept
       something done is completely ridiculous.     appearing and disappearing
                                                    from the Bookmarks menu
                                                    pad.  I've finally
   (How dare you suggest that                       determined that it's
   programmer freedom should not be                 settled down into the
   entirely unfettered!  Don't you                  right-click menu on each
   know that they're volunteers?  Bow               individual tab.  There's
   down and kiss their aching wrists                also supposed to be a
   and be *glad* that they're forcing               keyboard shortcut for it,
   features on you you don't care                   but it never seems to work
   about and breaking the ones that                 and it's discoverability
   you do.)                                         is weak, because the right
                                                    click menus don't have
                                                    these hints.


                                                    what exactly would the
                                                    logic be of associating
                                                    all tabs with a
                                                    particular tab?
                                                    Sometimes I wonder about
                                                    this.  But not very hard.

                                                    HIGH_TABS








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