My top 5 Firefox/Thunderbird annoyances
Firefox is constantly gaining marked share (especially here in Europe) and it’s little not-yet-so-popular brother Thunderbird is evolving too. While I’m happy that they’re contributing their part to bring Free Software to the masses, I’m concerned that the quality of their software (especially Firefox under Linux) has decreased in the last months.
Here are my top 5 annoyances for Firefox and Thunderbird. Some of them only apply to Debian’s version others are more visible on my fairly old and “slow” (1.5GHz/512MiB) Laptop than on current and therefor faster machines:
Firefox
- Firefox seems to have a massive problem with font kerning. Sometimes text is hardly readable since several letters seem to share the same one-letter space. And marking messed up text like this gives funny results:
- When visiting pages with a fixed background image like this, scrolling the page down causes massive CPU load and very slow scrolling even on fairly fast computers. Konqueror seems to handle pages like this much better.
- When reloading all tabs at once in a session and you have many (read: more than say, 6) tabs open, Firefox takes all the available CPU resources and pretty much becomes unresponsive until all tabs are loaded.
- Firefox literary freezes while loading very large pages (combine this with the previous annoyance for funny results)
- I still haven’t figured out why Firefox on my laptop (correctly) wants to launch kpdf when I open a .pdf while Firefox on my desktop seems to prefer xpdf. I’ve checked all the available options on both systems and wasn’t able to find the difference in the configuration.
Thunderbird
- The most annoying bug in Thunderbird is Debian specific: it doesn’t open links in a browser anymore for months. Since you have to change some non-obvious configuration to fix this, I assume this is the default behavior for many users out there which are now forced to copy-paste links to their browser.
- Like most other mail clients Thunderbird is also able to manage contacts. But it lacks two important features:
- No im/export of vcard: Hmm? Even outlook can do that and vcard is pretty much standard for storing contact information platform independent.
- No birthdays associated to contacts: Superb! When combining the Mozilla calendar application with Thunderbird you cannot just import all the birthdays from your contacts (which are stored as vcards of course), no you have to separately create those events which then of course are totally unrelated to the persons in your roster.
- The “search entire message” feature in the search box does absolutely nothing when searching in newsgroups. Why is it enabled then? Or: why does it pretend to do something by hiding all threads when entering something, suggesting no match was found?
- Wasn’t Thunderbird 1.x able to work with RSS feeds? What happened to this feature in Thunderbird 2.x?
- What happened to Thunderbird’s icon?
While I’m still happy with Thunderbird (or Iceddove as we call it here) I’m really searching for an alternative to Firefox (Iceweasel). Unfortunately there is currently no alternative available which fits all my needs. Firefox has two extensions no other browser seems to provide and without which I wouldn’t want to work anymore (I wonder if that was a proper English sentence…):
- Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer: which allows me to store my bookmarks on my (that’s right, not just foxmark’s) server to keep it in sync with all my Firefoxes on various places and machines.
- Adblock + Filterset.G Updater: which keeps me mostly ad-free and automatically supplies me with the newest filter set rules.
While other browsers have some ad-blocking functionality too, they all seem to lack the filter set updater. The next best alternatives are Konqueror and Epiphany but besides the lack of the above features every one of them has it’s own little quirks which doesn’t really motivate me to make the switch yet. But Konqueror is making progress and I’m really looking forward to KDE4 which will hopefully bring a usable web browser so I can finally get rid of Firefox.
Update: Ooops, I nearly forgot my favorite pet annoyance of Firefox under Linux: Why does it have to insult the user’s eyes with this ugly toolkit when drawing check boxes, line edits, buttons etc? Firefox under Windows paints stuff like that according to Windows’ current theme, Konqueror under Linux as well, but what does Firefox for years?
Tags: debian
August 15th, 2007 at 1:17 pm
You can import the list from Filterset.G Updater
into konqueror. Only light testing from me, but seems
to work ok.
regards,
Florian La Roche
August 15th, 2007 at 1:45 pm
FYI, the epiphany-extensions package includes an Ad Blocker extension that uses the filterset.g rules. There is no automatic update procedure at present, however.
August 15th, 2007 at 3:02 pm
Biggest FF annoyance for me is that when saving (already donloaded!) image to disk it freezes for quite a significant time… Interesting thing is Mozilla/Iceape doesn’t have this problem (actually it recovers *much* faster, on a fast machine it’s unnoticeable).
August 15th, 2007 at 7:00 pm
Cut and paste of URLs from Thunderbird?
Hmm, this just works for me at work, but I use to use klipper, highlight anything, and regex match offers a selection of things to do with URLs, so whilst I think this should “just work”, the fall back position should not be cut and paste.
Surely klipper is still around somewhere?
August 16th, 2007 at 12:37 am
I have to agree with you. There are many who would poo poo the claim of memory leaks, but having used Firefox for quite a while now, I can assure new people that it *does* leak, which is annoying for a fast desktop, but hell for a slow laptop. I still love it, because of the extensions and its usability, but sometimes after surfing around for awhile, I have to take into account the fact that I will have to shut itdown at some point and restart. I would certainly be interested in looking at Konqueror. Am currently also testing out k-meleon, but the support doesn’t seem to be quite on the same scale as Firefox, so I am on the look out for alternatives.
August 16th, 2007 at 9:15 am
I tried to switch to epiphany for a while.
It did work for a while, (native control buttons and theme), and feels a bit quicker than firefox, but the way it handles tabs repelled me off.. :-/
The freezing with very big pages is still there.
You can try it for a while to see if it fits you, though.
August 16th, 2007 at 11:16 am
There are other, unanswered annoyances as well, like: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=390725
I would prefer Galeon other Firefox. The problem is that Galeon is dead/unmaintained. Epiphany is a kind of successor to Galeon, but sadly enough, an inferior one.
Filterset.G is also the only reason I use Firefox. Perhaps I should try again Epiphany with the static filterset.
October 5th, 2007 at 9:32 pm
The slow scroll with fixed background images has been driving me nuts since FF2 (FF1 was fine, I think), not least as my own blog has one. However I just found a possible workaround on https://bugs.launchpad.net/firefox/+bug/125970
Basically, try setting MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1 in environment before running. This dramatically improves performance for me, and I haven’t yet found any side effects. Scrolling still uses 100% CPU but that matters much less when it’s near instant.
One of my FF bugbears is that it takes several seconds at 100% CPU to open a new window - and that includes the downloads window, which frequently doesn’t appear until after the download has completed. However this is probably down to the weight of the pile of extensions I use. But it’s Firefox, the whole point is to have a list of extensions as long as your arm!
October 7th, 2007 at 11:56 am
Firefox doesn’t use a toolkit for displaying html-form-widgets on Linux. Widgets are just css-styled boxes that can be adjusted by editing userContent.css.
November 23rd, 2007 at 4:43 am
“The most annoying bug in Thunderbird is Debian specific: it doesn’t open links in a browser anymore for months”
I had the same problem. The following solution help me:
1. Type “about:config” in Firefox address field
2. Create new string parameter with name “network.protocol-handler.app.http” and value “/usr/bin/firefox” (or other browser)
3. Check that parameter “network.protocol-handler.warn-external.http” is in “true”
4. Lounch Thunderbird. Links wuold open by click afte that.
December 15th, 2007 at 3:59 pm
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce
March 31st, 2008 at 11:41 pm
I’ve been trying to post in nvidia, ubuntu, firefox, fedora forums but they requires annoying registration …
this is the third posting, hopefully it helps some people with Firefox problem
Firefox slow scrolling fixed?
———————————-
Using out-of-the-box Xorg’s “nv” driver, Firefox has really slow or sluggish scrolling on certain websites (http://www.firingsquad.com/) rendering this world-class-browser almost useless.
I cannot blame the driver as both Opera & Konqueror browsers work just fine (QT & GTK issue?). Yet, I cannot blame the browser as changing to Vesa or Nvidia’s driver, fixed the problem.
Here are the workarounds:
***Vesa - monitor’s refresh rate is fixed at 60 Hz (headaches).
***Nvidia - manual installation (recompiling or missing dev. tools on liveCD) but provide other goodies (OpenGL)
***Nv - Enable ShadowFB option seems to fixed it but I think this option is deprecated? I really hope not, because I have not find other workarounds for this out-of-the-box driver (If anyone knows, please reply).
I don’t know why they (Xorg, Fedora or Ubuntu) don’t just enable this option by default because browsing the internet is one of the main activities for majority of users on a computer (after games, SETI, etc. rolleyes). Crippling this world-class-browser certainly will hamper Linux’s adoption for newcomers who relies on out-of-the-box drivers
Section “Device”
Identifier “Videocard0″
Driver “nv”
Option “ShadowFB” “true”
EndSection
I do not know if this problem affects ATi users but I am sure you can find a similar workaround and post it for all.
June 20th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
To get thunderbird to use for example konqueror for opening urls, you can include the following lines in your .default/prefs.js:
user_pref(”network.protocol-handler.app.ftp”, “konqueror”);
user_pref(”network.protocol-handler.app.http”, “konqueror”);
user_pref(”network.protocol-handler.app.https”, “konqueror”);
or add them via the config editor.
July 10th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
Some addons may slow down FF. Try disabling addons.