I hurriedly upgraded to Firefox’s new preview release 1.0 after reading about it at Gadgetopia. Perhaps I was a bit hasty. Once again, a couple of the extensions that I use extensively are not yet compatible with the new version. Still, there are some benefits to be gained.
The new version includes this crazy search bar. Instead of popping up a window when you hit Ctrl-F, a new toolbar thingie appears at the bottom of the window. The toolbar has a space to type the search term, and a couple of buttons that let you cycle through all of the instances on the page. There is also a button that will highlight the term wherever it appears. Appropriate errors appear in the bar when the search cycles back to the top of bottom, or when the term isn’t present. That’s a nice addition.
Another thing they’ve changed is the popup notifier. Instead of displaying a small icon in the status bar, a new popup bar appears at the top of a window whenever an unauthorized web page attempts to create a popup window. Clicking the bar displays a context menu, somewhat like the menu in the Windows XP SP2 Internet Explorer, with one significant difference: You can show the intended popup windows.
Unlike Internet Explorer, the popup blocker in Firefox remembers what windows the page tried to open, and gives you the option on the popup menu to display those particular popups. So if you’ve gone to a new site that you really want the popups for and you don’t set the “popups ok” option, you can still see the popups that you missed.
For that matter, you can see popups on blocked sites if you’re just curious. Like those popups that Amazon throws every so often. I don’t want it to pop up every time, but I might like to see what the special offer is once. So I’ll keep them off my whitelist, but I’ll use the menu to display the popup one time. Neat.
Firefox seems more integrated with email clients now, too. When I click on the Read Mail option, it brings up Outlook. This was not what I expected, but better. Maybe it’s been doing this all along and I didn’t notice until now.
Oooh! Hey, look, div borders aren’t broken like they used to be in 0.9! Sweet!
But as I said, there are some extensions that aren’t working. The tabbrowser extension isn’t up to date yet, so my colorized groups of tabs are not appearing when I open pages into new tabs. This is quite confusing. Also, the Web Developer extension has not yet updated, so I’ve been using Ctrl-U to view source for the past day. I imagine that I’m going to be really annoyed that it’s missing soon enough - I’m not sure how I did without it before.
Anyway, the whole project will soon be complete, and everyone should install it. That would fix all of the problems I’m having in getting the site to look decent in IE. Stinking non-compliant browser…
