Firefox is buggy

Tuesday, January 11th, 2005

Okay, first off all, don’t take what I say the wrong way. I know how zealots react to the kind of stuff I’m about to say. They’ll downplay me, call it FUD, tell me ‘works for me’, and all that other bullshit. But what I’m saying here is the truth, okay. Don’t feel the need to defend the product because what it ultimatelly boils down to is the truth. Why? Because I’m confronted with it:

Firefox is buggy as hell.

There, I said it. I’m sorry. I’m having real problems living with this piece of shisoftware. Here’s what’s wrong:

• A DIV element with overflow:auto as a CSS property can’t be scrolled with the mouse. The bug has been open in bugzilla for about a hundredmillion years. (not exaggerated!)
• Pop-ups don’t get blocked. I know, I know it “works for you”. Guess what? I don’t care, because it doesn’t work for me. The problem seems to be that the little ‘Block popups [x]’ option keeps getting turned off, and it’s driving me nuts. If I turn it on, it should STAY on, no matter what.
• ‘Firefox has prevented this site from opening a pop-up’. This feature is pretty nice. If it worked. Which it doesn’t. So I can’t unblock sites easily, but have to go to edit -> preferences -> etc. I don’t like that.
• Rendering of overlapping DIV tags is bad. When I scroll, I can see where the hidden DIV’s are because the text doesn’t align with the text which isn’t under the hidden DIV. That’s right, the text is garbled. Unacceptable. When you scroll, it’s even worse.
• Various different extentions totally screw up the browser when used, making extentions useless. Some guy from Opera already said this, and he was right. I mean, come on.. I had 4 extensions loaded, and already everything was being screwed up. I know you think this isn’t Firefox’s fault, but it is! It’s firefox who’s not doing any quality control over extensions. And you know, firefox without extensions is just an annoying little browser which can’t be made to do what I want.
• On a clean install, the font-sizes where WAY ot of propertion. I was looking at a menubar with fontsize 26 or something. Had to hack user.js.some.bloody.prefs.js.file.or.whatever.txt.xml.rdf.txt.js and manually put the fontsize on some sane setting. (And NO, this had nothing to do with some preference)

There’s much more to complain about. I could go on and on and on. However, since I’m posting this using Firefox, I’m too afraid the damned thing will crash if I type any further, so I’m gonna quit typing while I have the chance. (Okay, it’s actually not that bad. Firefox only crashed on me once since I installed v1.0, but I’m pissed okay? Let me rant)

Update: As I was reading over this article, I decided to turn on just a bare minimum of extensions so I could at least block some ads and have some better tab preferences. Guess what? I promptly found Yet Another Annoying Bug. When I go to Tools -> Extensions and I rightclick on an extensions it will highlight the extension which I clicked, but I’ll get the context-sensitive menu of the previously selected extension. So when I rightclick on a disabled extensions, I’ll get a option to ‘disable’ the extension. What the hell? It’s already disabled you dumbass browser! I need an ‘enable’ option! Bah, buggy piece of shit.

Update II: It’s even worse than I thought. I’ve got Pop-up blocking set to ‘on’, and my own site set as an exception. When I click on an ‘edit’ or ‘New’ link in my log, it doesn’t open a pop-up, which it should. Even if my site was blocked, which it isn’t, it should still open an pop-up since I requested it by clicking on the link.

Update III: It seems the bug at update II was caused by an extension that wasn’t officially supported by Mozilla Update, namely ‘Tab browser extensions’