A slightly different kind of Firefox thread

[Holdfast]

I've had to switch browsers. Note the "had" because I was perfectly happy using IE8 until very recently and the change was because something weird started happening to the browser whereby it would hang for ages, not loading pages. I suspect a combination of various things running at the same time, causing it to just sit there, not properly loading pages occasionally.

Anyway, I couldn't solve the problem, so I downloaded and tried out a few different browsers (Chrome, Firefox and Opera) and after using each for a half-hour or so, opted to go with Firefox, largely because of the excellent IE8Fox add-on, which made the transition to using Firefox really easy by making it look almost exactly like IE8, except it's working.

There are a few other things I'd like advice on though, and I know a lot of people here use Firefox, so thought it would be the best place to ask!

In return, I offer a bit of advice for anyone else who ends up switching from IE8 because of an unfixable problem, but prefers how IE8 looks:

a) Use Firefox, because you can skin it to put everything where IE8 does.
b) Use IE8Fox for that.
c) Fix the harsh font rendering by turning on ClearType across your system from your Display Properties on the desktop. This is what IE uses within its browser to make text look nicely readable that the other browsers (including Firefox) do not.
d) fix the tab opening order in Firefox by editing about:config. Google this up for details.
e) most of the little scripts/tweaks in IE have a Firefox equivalent if you browse through the add-ons. Personally I intend using only minimal amounts of add-ons, to keep things fast, but found ones quite easily to perform the extra functionalities that I needed.

That should get you to within 95% of how IE8 looks & behaves (which is easily the cleanest-looking of all the browsers I tried), while retaining Firefox's functionality. Hope that helps anyone else in my position.

Now the bits I need advice with:

a) I want the favourites/bookmarks menu to autocollapse when I expand another folder within it. I found an add-on meant to do this, but it doesn't seem to work with IE8Fox. Does anyone know of another way to do this? It's annoying scrolling through expanded subfolders and/or clicking to collapse them.

b) Text boxes/forms like the one I'm typing in to make this post are behaving weirdly. I can't use some of the keyboard shortcuts I could before and some others behave differently. IE8 used the same logic as MS Word but Firefox seems to do things subtly differently:

For instance, in IE8, if I was scrolling down through a chunk of text using the DownArrow, I could combine that with CTRL on the last line, and skip directly to the end of that final line. Now I have to use CTRL-END instead, which is annoying.

c) Also when using CTRL-LeftArrow or CTRL-RightArrow to skip through words in a sentence quickly, if there's a punctuation mark in the sentence, then when I use this shortcut, it ignores it in Firefox and treats it like any other word. For instance, in IE8, if I used CTRL-Left to move back through this very sentence, the cursor would jump to the start of every word EXCEPT where there's a comma, where it would jump from the start of the word after the comma to the END of the word just before the comma. The same applied to periods. This was really useful because it lets you add afterthoughts easily to the end of clauses/sentences.

Is there a way to change how Firefox manages text boxes? Or an add-on to alter this?

Thanks! I know that new muscle memory will deal with these remaining niggles over time, but I'd prefer it if I didn't need to relearn it!

 

[sojourner]

Can't help ya with your questions, but isn't your advice C technically against forum rules?

 

[Jadzia]

He's a moderator. He makes the rules.

I notice there are also two bits of advice C, perhaps forward planning making it easier to edit one of them out in the future.

 

[Chaos Descending]

??? Did I miss something?

What was said that might be against the rules?

 

[RJDiogenes]

Nothing. Nothing at all.

 

[Holdfast]

I must have missed the memo on how just even naming that type of software is not allowed now. Wow. I didn't even mentally connect the dots of mentioning it, with this site, since I don't see them here anyway, being a mod. Sorry, and thanks to RJD for the ninja edit.

Anyway, leaving that aside, does anyone know a way round the niggles I mentioned? Especially the stuff with using my keyboard shortcuts the way I want to in the text/form boxes! Thanks!

 

[1001001]

Man, that's some specific technical stuff I never even notice!



I switched to Firefox about 8 months ago. I like it fine.

Sorry I can't help you with your specific questions. I must just be using the default settings, because I've never done anything to it.

Good luck!

 

[sojourner]

I must have missed the memo on how just even naming that type of software is not allowed now.

To be fair, you did more than mention it. You had it as an advised addon to install.

 

[Shikarnov]

I don't know about the textbox issue, but I'd wager that there's no way to modify the control's behavior without compiling a custom version of Firefox from the source. I'll keep looking, though, if for no other reason than to keep one more person from using that steaming pile of crap from Microsoft.

About the bookmarks: Extension inter-compatibility can be a tough nut to crack. I would recommend sending a note to the developer of the addon you found to ask if they have a solution now, or if one is forthcoming. You could always try using the bookmarks sidebar (View > Sidebar > Bookmarks).

I think it's a testament to Firefox's capability and flexibility that you were able to get it to look and feel so much like IE. But, in the end, it is a different beast and there may be no solution other than get used to the differences.

c) Fix the harsh font rendering by turning on ClearType across your system from your Display Properties on the desktop. This is what IE uses within its browser to make text look nicely readable that the other browsers (including Firefox) do not.

Most browsers tend to leave font rendering to the operating system. I'm actually surprised that IE8 hijacks the system rendering like this (a big usability violation -- but MS never cared much about that sort of thing), but I think I'm more surprised that you haven't been using ClearType system-wide all along. Can I ask why not?

d) fix the tab opening order in Firefox by editing about:config. Google this up for details.

I missed the early part of the discussion -- is it a no-no to tell people the actual key within about:config?

 

[Jadzia]

I missed the early part of the discussion -- is it a no-no to tell people the actual key within about:config?

No, the earlier part of the discussion was because a piece of software that stops adverts being displayed on websites, was listed as an advised addon. And that is not allowed to be promoted here.

The key for tab order is unrelated, and merely changes where a new tab is positioned in your tab bar, when you create a new tab. This change of behaviour only affects Firefox 3.6+. To make it behave like earlier versions of Firefox (and IE8), you set type about:config into the address bar, and set the key

browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent  == False

 

[Holdfast]

I don't know about the textbox issue, but I'd wager that there's no way to modify the control's behavior without compiling a custom version of Firefox from the source. I'll keep looking, though, if for no other reason than to keep one more person from using that steaming pile of crap from Microsoft.

Thanks! I appreciate the information, even if it's to tell be what can't be done, and what I just need to readjust to.

The textbox thing surprises me though. Surely this is something that other people apart from me must have noticed. I mean the thing about CTRL-Left or CTRL-Right is something everyone who uses MS Word will be familiar with?

Using the above paragraph as an example if I CTRL-left'ed through the paragraph and reached the "though. Surely" bit of the sentence, the cursor jumps from in front of S to in front of the t. In IE (and Word) it jumps from front of the S to after the h, and THEN to before the t. This is a really convenient little feature. Even the really crappy and user-unfriendly web-browser based front-end to the oracle-based database I use at work uses this feature when entering text. So I'm really surprised Firefox doesn't.

On another point, I do think MS generally gets a rough deal though. In terms of look&feel, it just feels cleaner and somehow more professionally thought through/laid-out than the other browsers. Chrome was a close second; I appreciated its drive towards simplicity. Firefox just felt clunky and non-intuitive in terms of layout without the skinning though. It's a shame MSIE stopped working properly so annoyingly but I think it was because of the sheer number of 3rd party utilities I was needing to use to keep it safe/secure/convenient to use and they stopped get on with each other eventually.

Extension inter-compatibility can be a tough nut to crack. I would recommend sending a note to the developer of the addon you found to ask if they have a solution now, or if one is forthcoming.

I had the same idea, and plan shooting off a quick note later today, if I can find contact details.

I think it's a testament to Firefox's capability and flexibility that you were able to get it to look and feel so much like IE.

Oh, I agree, I'm not knocking Firefox at all; I only have a few little niggles, and most importantly, it's actually working!

c) Fix the harsh font rendering by turning on ClearType across your system from your Display Properties on the desktop. This is what IE uses within its browser to make text look nicely readable that the other browsers (including Firefox) do not.

Most browsers tend to leave font rendering to the operating system. I'm actually surprised that IE8 hijacks the system rendering like this (a big usability violation -- but MS never cared much about that sort of thing), but I think I'm more surprised that you haven't been using ClearType system-wide all along. Can I ask why not?

I've never needed it. By default WinXP (or at least, my VAIO) uses a different font smoothing system normally (listed as Standard), which worked just fine on every other application, so I never looked into it. I switched that round to ClearType after googling up the font problem in Firefox. I didn't even know such a thing existed before. There doesn't seem to be a really significant difference in any other app (well, maybe some fonts seem very marginally "oversmoothed" now in some other apps but it's hardly noticeable really).

Thanks again!

 

[Holdfast]

...

 

[RJDiogenes]

thanks to RJD for the ninja edit.

Thanks for having two list items labeled 'c.'

 

[M'Sharak]

Extension inter-compatibility can be a tough nut to crack. I would recommend sending a note to the developer of the addon you found to ask if they have a solution now, or if one is forthcoming.

I had the same idea, and plan shooting off a quick note later today, if I can find contact details.

The contact details can often be found at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ on the page for the add-on in question.

 

[TorontoTrekker]

On another point, I do think MS generally gets a rough deal though. In terms of look&feel, it just feels cleaner and somehow more professionally thought through/laid-out than the other browsers.

As a developer, however, I loathe IE because it doesn't adhere to CSS standards. Stuff that looks perfectly okay in Firefox, Chrome, Safari or Opera looks like crap in IE.

For example, suppose you have some text that's inside a container. In your HTML, it looks like this:

<span class="spanClass1">
an image and some long text goes here
</span>

You would think that the span would be rendered in such a way that the image and all of the text would appear neatly within it. But oh, no - the text was fine, but the image protruded below the bottom of the span (which was a grey box). I had to write code that would calculate the height that the span needed to be (not as easy as you might think) and add a style attribute to my span tag. Argh.

One weird thing I learned about this week, though, is that Firefox 3.0.18, when running on a Mac, doesn't seem to handle AJAX calls correctly. (It works fine on a PC, but Macs and PCs have different JavaScript engines.) Fortunately, the function in question is only accessible to three or four people who are administrators of the content management system I developed, so our solution was to tell them "upgrade to version 3.6".