Firefox Gripes

Now that Firefox has reached version 1.0, it's time for some griping!

The FreeBSD www/firefox port is still a little broken, and required some medium-level trickiness to produce a working executable. Not Firefox's fault, though.
I have set the option to "Close the Download Manager when all downloads are complete." It even even works in this version, finally. However, when I use the "Save Image As" popup menu item, the download manager still doesn't go away. This seems to be a matter of timing - it only happens if the download is very fast. Bug #243324.
The Go menu item (not the button, the menu item) pisses me off. Every time my mouse pointer so much as glides over it, Firefox locks up for a couple minutes. I don't even have to click, just pass through its airspace. This is on a 3 GHz machine! Admittedly it's because I have my history expiration set to 365 days, but there's nothing wrong with that. I have no use for the Go menu item and wish I could just get rid of it, or at least disable it. Possible solution from Steve Green: the Compact Menu extension, which can remove items from the menu bar.
On some forms of page load error, Firefox blanks out the URL field. On some other errors it just stays on the previous page. Both of these behaviors make it much harder to correct a mis-typed URL.
If a page has multiple copies of the same image, Firefox does separate fetches for each copy. If the site is slow this can take a long time.
After some menu operations, Firefox keeps the keyboard focus even if you move the mouse pointer to another window.
The RSS "Live Bookmarks" stuff is fairly worthless. Solution: install Sage.
The password manager doesn't work until the page has finished loading. If you click Stop, password manager still doesn't work. On a page where some images or frames are very slow to load, this makes the password manager useless. JavaScript behaves the same way - it's not active until the page load completes on its own. Bug #221634.
The Plugin Finder Service sux0r. It doesn't even tell you what plugin is missing, so you could try to find it on your own.
Favicons are unreliable. Sometimes they show up. Sometimes they show up later. Sometimes they never show up.
Let's say you have a page which consists only of a single frameset containing another page - used by some folks as a sort of redirect. Let's say the inner page has an RSS feed. Well, that feed is not visible when you're on the outer page. Seems to me that RSS feeds on any frame in the page ought to show up. Bug #274915.
The "page you are trying to view contains POSTDATA that has expired from cache" warning box seems to pop up on a completely random basis. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It really ought to be consistent.
Firefox's DNS lookups seem to be single threaded. If one window is stalled waiting for a dead name server, all other windows are stalled too. Furthermore, if you hit Stop and try to load some other page, you're still stalled until the previous DNS lookup times out. Bug #237582. Recommended solution: upgrade to FreeBSD 5.3.
Most of Firefox's windows go away with a ^W, but some of the information dialogs do not. You have to use the window manager's delete function to get rid of those.
A ^W in a text field should NOT vaporize the window, it should erase the previous word. And the other standard DEC-style text-editing control characters should work too.
Hitting Reload on a framed page doesn't reliably reload the frameset, only the contained pages. Exitting and restarting Firefox does get you the new frame.
Sometimes Java stops working. Quitting firefox and starting a new one fixes it.

If you know how to fix any of these things, or have gripes of your own to add, please let me know!

Other Firefox gripes pages:

Firefox bug reporting.
Back to Jef's page.