Monday, August 22, 2005
Mozilla Troubles
I recently listed some of the Firefox extensions that I like. Well, after an extention update I ended up with a conflict. Firefox would startup fine, but you couldn't open pages that were supposed to open in a new window (not popups) and Firefox would not exit properly. That isn't the worst trouble I have had with extensions, at least it starts this time. I finally narrowed it down to an extention that isn't that important so I disabled it and am back to normal. But finding it took time and effort, the average user is not going to put up with that.
Another extention trouble I ran into recently was with Thunderbird on my Dad's computer. He couldn't send mail. Since I wasn't around I couldn't help solve the problem for most of a month. He had clicked on one of those update reminders and got a bad version of an extention. But from his description of the problem originally that wasn't clear or I could have solved it over the phone by telling him how to disabled it.
Another Thunderbird bug he has found is the inability to turn off "Shrink to Fit Page Width." The option exists, but won't stay set when you restart Thunderbird. He prints a lot (I try to make him cut back) and has run into some messages that are shrunk so small they are nearly unreadable. It happens when a plain text message has improper line lengths. Then Thunderbird shrinks the page to get as much as it can of the paragraph on one line.
Another thing that bothers me about Thunderbird is the header view. I can't stand it. I kept my old outdated mail client for years longer than I should have because of it. I liked the old way Netscape Communicator did it; the headers appeared as part of the mail and scroll with it. Mnenhy helps, but has other side effects I don't like. Kmail is pretty good, but is for Linux. I use Linux some, but I am mostly a Windows user.
Hopefully with the 1.5 releases comming up much of this will go away. The new IE7 (even if a dissapointment in standards compliance) seems to be a giant improvement. The reason many people switched away from IE was it's problems, not Mozilla's features. I doubt they would have a problem with switching back.
I am eager to see IE7, most reviews I have read don't really focus on the details I am interested in, but IEBlog gives some details that sound good. I doubt I would ever use it as my main browser, seeing as I would love to chunk all my MS stuff go Linux. But I can just imagine all the things I won't have to work around when writing CSS once most people have upgraded.
Another extention trouble I ran into recently was with Thunderbird on my Dad's computer. He couldn't send mail. Since I wasn't around I couldn't help solve the problem for most of a month. He had clicked on one of those update reminders and got a bad version of an extention. But from his description of the problem originally that wasn't clear or I could have solved it over the phone by telling him how to disabled it.
Another Thunderbird bug he has found is the inability to turn off "Shrink to Fit Page Width." The option exists, but won't stay set when you restart Thunderbird. He prints a lot (I try to make him cut back) and has run into some messages that are shrunk so small they are nearly unreadable. It happens when a plain text message has improper line lengths. Then Thunderbird shrinks the page to get as much as it can of the paragraph on one line.
Another thing that bothers me about Thunderbird is the header view. I can't stand it. I kept my old outdated mail client for years longer than I should have because of it. I liked the old way Netscape Communicator did it; the headers appeared as part of the mail and scroll with it. Mnenhy helps, but has other side effects I don't like. Kmail is pretty good, but is for Linux. I use Linux some, but I am mostly a Windows user.
Hopefully with the 1.5 releases comming up much of this will go away. The new IE7 (even if a dissapointment in standards compliance) seems to be a giant improvement. The reason many people switched away from IE was it's problems, not Mozilla's features. I doubt they would have a problem with switching back.
I am eager to see IE7, most reviews I have read don't really focus on the details I am interested in, but IEBlog gives some details that sound good. I doubt I would ever use it as my main browser, seeing as I would love to chunk all my MS stuff go Linux. But I can just imagine all the things I won't have to work around when writing CSS once most people have upgraded.
