The Firefox Conspiracy
I like Firefox. I don’t get quite as “Holier-Than-Thou” about the browser as others do, largely because it’s just a web browser*, but I can read web pages the way nature intended (i.e. without a bunch of Internet Explorer proprietary shit getting in the way) and so all is right with the world. Firefox 2 is not without its bugs, however, and one bug in particular is beginning to… well, to bug me. It’s this one:
Quick find bar opens when typing in text fields
The / (slash) and ‘ (apostrophe)keys are shortcuts to open the Quick Find bar. You can also configure Firefox to automatically search for text when you type any characters outside of a text field. When typing in a text field these characters should show up in the text field and not trigger the Quick Find bar.
I don’t know if this bug has been fixed in Firefox 3 as I haven’t downloaded it yet (I’ll get into that in a bit) but from what I can recall while researching the bug a year or two ago it was one that Mozilla were aware of but weren’t fixing. I remember reading that when people reported the bug the Firefox devteam would get quite arsey about it, saying that they had no intention of fixing it and stupidly telling people to fix it themselves because it’s Firefox and it’s Open Source and they have Better Things To Do than to fix one teeny tiny bug. Indeed, a simple Google search for firefox Quick Find bug reveals a number of fixes available. Mozilla never fixed this bug themselves, though. Note that down because I’ll be referring to it later.
The bug is annoying, but as it only happened sporadically (maybe once a week, if that) and it can be “fixed” by opening and closing a dialogue box such as the Options window or the “About…” blurb, I saw no real pressing urge to repair the glitch.
Spin on to this past two weeks - this glitch is now popping up every time I run Firefox. Not just on my desktop PC at home, but on my laptop and my work computer as well. I’ve come to anticipate the glitch by first opening and closing the “About…” dialogue, which is easy enough, but then there are some other small glitches which occur as a side-effect of this - opening a new tab with Ctrl+T doesn’t automatically place the focus on the address bar, for instance, so I can open a new tab and type in an address only for nothing to happen at all.
I yesterday I was about to do what I always do when a program is glitching on me - look for an updated version. Then I remembered that, oh yes, Firefox 3 was released this week. And, oh, weren’t Mozilla trying to go for a download world record on June 18th? The little cogs began a-turnin’ in my head and I began to wonder: What if Mozilla deliberately “timed” this bug to become more annoying around the time Firefox 3 launched? What if the very reason they decided not to fix this glitch and become arrogant cocks at the mere mention of it were because they had planned to use it to encourage annoyed people to update when FF3 became available on the 18th?
I’d deliberately avoided upgrading to FF3 before I came to this realization because the browser is incompatible with pretty much every plug-in and add-on available for FF2, but now I’m even less inclined to want to update. I don’t like the idea that Mozilla may be forcing people to update their browser just because they want to break some kind of non-existent, unimportant, trivial record. I don’t like the idea of being forced to update at all, to be honest. And now, as if by magic, Firefox is refusing to acknowledge input from the arrow keys, so in order to me to go back and fix a typo I had to click on it rather than use the arrow keys to get back to that point. Harrumph. Harrumph, I say.
Anyway, that’s my Unnecessarily Paranoid Conspiracy Theory for the year. Tune in again next June.
* I have a great deal of difficulty comprehending why it is exactly that people get so militant about their choice of browser. Firefox users tend to consider themselves the Cats Meow because they happen to have a standards-compliant browser, which is also Open Source (and we all know what a bunch of elitist wankers most Open Source advocates are). Opera users tend to rank themselves higher than the Firefox users because their browser is somehow more compliant and passes some obscure test that only people who work in web design for a living will have any idea about.
Why does anyone actually give a shit? Why does anyone give any bodily fluid about which browser they’re using? As long as nobody’s using Internet Explorer aren’t we basically alright? Get a little perspective, people.
June 20th, 2008 at 8:59 am
The problem with your conspiracy theory is that the whole Open Source thing would mean *someone* would find it, and Mozilla would be laughed off the internet.
As for FF3 addons - Which? Half of my addons didn’t work when I was using the FF3 beta, or the first day of release, but today I got about 3 million addon updates and they all work now. Google Browser Sync is the only one I can think of that is broken.
(As for the not-bug fixing, that *is* a problem, the same thing happened with the too-long-image-tooltips thing, Mozilla are crap sometimes!)
June 20th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
To be fair, Firefox users don’t use a standards-compliant browser, and nor does anyone else. And if they did, that wouldn’t be a good thing because the standards themselves are a bit crap.
The internet is badly broken, but it still just about works, which is the only reason nobody’s really tried to fix it. Of course, if someone did try, there’s still a whole raft of reasons why they couldn’t.
June 21st, 2008 at 6:46 am
Mmmm… So the guys who claims that people who are reluctant to switch to Vista, despite its major lack of backward compatibility and drivers compatibility even 2 years after release is the one that sees evil in a non commercial software released a couple of days ago. Interesting!
To discuss Andrew’s point and add to Ben’s annoyance, so far, the sole web engine totally based on web standard (the first to pass the Acid 3 test) is WebKit, funnily enough, powering Safari… Ahem ahem…
June 21st, 2008 at 7:37 am
As Andrew claims, there really is no such thing as standards. Because even if you do follow the W3C specifications by the book, you’re still gonna break most of the internet, because everyone follows “standards” to a different degree. (this is why the special Opera version that passes the Acid 3 test isn’t public) This is the dillema browsers face. What is the right balance between following standards and not breaking the internet. Even IE8 is facing this dillema, although mostly because they’ve dug themselves too deep by creating their own standards, so that everytime they try to follow W3C a bit more they’ll break everything that was developed for IE and more. (which is why the IE8 Beta1 is horrible)
As for Firefox, I’ve seen other bugs, like the famous “ALT text doesn’t fit on screen”, which the developers also refused to fix and badmouthed everyone that mentioned it (although I’m told it’s fixed in FF3, now that you mention it). But I’m not out to call conspiracy just yet because this kind of assholism and ignorance is very common in open-source projects.
What gets on my tits about Firefox is the apparent cult-like following it has. You have entire legions of people that will devote entire sites, fanart, download days, meetings, flame wars, statistics and more just for a browser. Everytime something happens with Firefox you’ll hear about it on every corner on the Internet.
I’ll admit some Opera fans can also have this kind of (disappointing) mentality, but it still pales compared to Firefox. In fact, I’ve seen Opera outcast a lot merely because OH BUT IT’S NOT OOOOPEN-SOURCE or OH IT WASN’T ALWAYS FREEEEE.
As usual, the internet boggles the mind.
June 21st, 2008 at 10:04 am
For example, AJAX isn’t part of any web standard. If you make your browser totally standards-based, GMail won’t load. That’s not useful.
The web-standards say you shouldn’t use HTML for layout, but they provide no way to do several common layouts without invoking a table or two, or using huge images and dozens of nested divs drawn on top of each other.
And last I heard, the web standards say that any xhtml document not perfectly valid should not render. That would kill almost every website on the internet. Dynamically generating valid xhtml to do what you want based on unreliable user input isn’t a trivial task.
June 21st, 2008 at 10:14 am
I don’t personally use Opera because it doesn’t do everything I’d like it to do, but that doesn’t mean I won’t use it at all. I’m not married to Firefox or anything, it just happens to have all the features I like in a browser, with the ability to pick and choose additional features as I see fit.
That said, Opera seems to suffer from the same pretentiousness that Firefox suffers from. Here’s a quote from Opera’s website:
Firefox does this. Internet Explorer does this. How is this supposed to make me want to switch over to Opera?
June 22nd, 2008 at 7:17 am
It’s marketing-speak. When you search through a browser’s History, you’ll only get results that match the page’s URL or Title. In Opera 9.5, you’ll also get results that match the page’s actual content (so you can look for pages in your History with the word “stuff” in them). This is something also introduced in Firefox 3. Competition!
June 22nd, 2008 at 10:01 am
That’s funny, because I remember FF2 finding results based on page content as well.
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