Sunday, October 29, 2006

Firefox 2.0 + Slashdot + Gmail = Crap

Before installing FF 2 on my Windows XP box I'd heard of "improvements" in tab behavior that I suspected would annoy me (e.g., "close" buttons on individual tabs instead of just one; which at least can be un-improved through about:config). However, what I didn't expect is that there would be new bugs in the tab implementation that would affect how I read Slashdot's daily "headlines" email on Gmail.

In the "old" days, when I clicked a link in the Slashdot-headlines email message, FF 1.5 opened a new window and shifted the focus to it. (Incidentally, this is also what MS IE 7 does so I presume this is the intended behavior.)

FF 2.0, in contrast, opens a new tab and shifts the focus to that tab. Each of these behaviors irritates me.

And the crappy thing about this is that in Options -> Tabs I have set "New pages should be open in..." to "A new window" (not a new tab) and UN-ticked "When I open a link in a new tab, switch to it immediately."

In FF 1.5, I could work around the focus shift with a simple ALT-tab and, moreover, separate windows fit the way I read the Slashdot headlines. Separate tabs do not.

So, in sum, as much as I love FF and prefer it over IE (and as much as I love the new spellchecking feature--which, incidentally, just marked "spellchecking" as an error), I may have to back-step to the almost-latest version.