Firefox 3 beta 3 finally has updated their add-ons dialog window. I ranted about this way back in 2006. Goes to show that typing blog posts is a good replacement for fixing things yourself. (No it isn't.) You can now sort of download some Firefox extensions in the Tools => Add-ons window.

I say "sort of" because it still doesn't do nearly as much as I wish it did. For example it only seems to offer you a few of the top "recommended" extensions for immediate download. It still retains the magic link that takes you to the Firefox addons website if you want to view more than those. And there's now a search box for searching plugins, but doing the search in the window only shows a few results, and if you want to see ALL results you still have to go to the Firefox website.

Also this new magic add-ons-browser only seems to work for extensions. Not themes. Oops. Another annoyance is that when searching themes on the Firefox website, it shows themes for all versions of Firefox, including old themes that don't work with the version of Firefox that I'm using. This is highly annoying. It'd probably be hard to write a web page to automatically filter out themes and extensions I can't use based on my browser, but it doesn't seem like it'd be hard to do that if everything was in a window in Firefox itself.

And installing extensions still pops up an annoying Vista-like "ARE YOU SURE I SHOULD INSTALL THIS?" dialog, which counts down from 3 to 0 just to make sure the annoyance is complete. And installing themes still requires me to restart the browser before I can use it. Opera doesn't require a restart. Early versions of Firefox didn't require a restart, but admittedly if you didn't restart, horribly bad things happened until you did. Maybe no one can figure out how to get Firefox to do it right, or maybe there's some technical reason for it, but it's still annoying.

So Firefox 3 beta 3 is a bit better than before in the add-ons-installing department, but still oh so far from optimal. Why do I need to go to a web page (a clumsy webpage that seems to be perpetually changing its interface) to download themes and extensions? Opera has this solved beautifully for themes. Even many KDE apps (e.g. Amarok) let you download themes and plugins via a popup window in the app itself. Why do I need to restart Firefox (thus losing all my session authentications, thus forcing me to re-type a billion passwords for everything I was doing) just to change how the buttons look?

This is just a minor nit-pick. Firefox 3 beta 3 is looking pretty good in general. Bookmarks work better now. No more annoying focus-grabbing yes/no dialog boxes about saving passwords. And so on.

In other Firefox news not related to the beta, I finally figured out how to turn off Firefox's God-awfully annoying form auto-completion. Note to self: browser.formfill.enable in about:config. Formfill is the bane of my existence. I can't remember how many times I've typed a google search, then accidentally clicked the formfill dropdown and replaced my carefully crafted search string with something from the formfill history. Argh. Well now I need worry no longer.

(Took me forever to figure out what to search for in about:config to locate this option. "Text field"? "Drop down"? "Auto complete"? The term "formfill" somehow never occurred to me.)

I tried Firefox 3 beta 2 today. (Happily it was in Portage, albeit hard-masked.) Seems to work OK so far. I managed to crash it once already by trying to open eight websites at once. But it is a beta after all.

Turns out some of the weird issues I was having with my neverending photoblog project may have been Opera-related. Opera would hang and fail to connect to my locally-running Hunchentoot server very often. Firefox though never seems to have that problem. Very odd.

Firefox 3 also seems to incorporate (maybe "rip off" is a better term) some of the nice features of the Opera versions. Like the dropdown list of history items matching text you type into the location bar. Firefox's version of this looks much nicer than Opera's and doesn't cause the whole interface to lag like Opera's does. You can also get speed dial for Firefox, and this Firefox extension seems to be more configurable than the built-in Opera version. Firefox + extensions does a very good job of imitating most of the good things about Opera, at the end of the day.

So yeah, there isn't a heck of a lot of reason to use Opera. It's a great program but it's always been quirky in my experience, and seems to be still even in the latest versions. So I'm going back to Firefox for a while.

I was pleasantly surprised at how many themes and extensions are already up-to-date and usable in Firefox 3 beta 2. In particular I'm now using this very nice dark theme. And Adblock Plus works in Firefox 3 already, which I kind of missed when using Opera. Unfortunately the same old horrendous theme / extension installer dialog box is still there, unfriendly as ever. If Firefox is going to rip off features of Opera, I wish they'd pick Opera's theme installer, because it's far superior.

Aside from little layout tweaks, there doesn't seem to be anything really revolutionary in Firefox 3 though. It's kind of a let-down in one way, but I read that there were a lot of updates to the rendering engine, so that's good. And then again maybe there are only so many features you can (or should) cram into a web browser.

I've been using Firefox since, oh, probably version 0.3 or 0.4 when it was still called Phoenix. Those were fun days. I used to badger everyone in sight to use it. when no one except uber-geeks had ever heard of it. Nowadays almost everyone I know uses it, and I'm always thrilled to see random strangers, even non-geeks, using Firefox. The word is clearly getting out.

My conversion to Opera is still going well. I'm not sure that browsing is altogether more enjoyable or anything, but it's at least as good as Firefox. I'm getting into using the sidebar nowadays. I tend to have an aversion to sidebars in general, but Opera's are hideable and displayable via a toolbar button, which is nice. It's very flexible. The sidebar is a perhaps ideal location for bookmarks; menu-based bookmark browsing annoys me to no end. Same with history. It's also a nice place for file download progress to be shown. The download dialog box in Firefox is my mortal enemy.

I think sometimes about how fickle I am when it comes to software. Linux users can afford to be fickle. It's one of the perks of being a Linux user. For web browsers we have at least two wonderful choices, Firefox and Opera. Think about how many choices we have for text editors, xterm-clones, IM and chat clients, graphics editors, music players, video players, desktop environments and window managers, scripting languages, pretty much everything. Even OS choice; we have so many Linux distros to use. And if you don't want Linux, there's BSD and other alternatives.

We're really spoiled in the open source software world. Most of us never contribute a speck of anything to the majority of these projects. We happily use them and we can stop using them on a whim and use others.

Sometimes I tell myself that simply using the software and telling others about it is a form of giving back to the community. Basically "spreading the word". I have personally influenced a few people to use Linux, to a lesser or greater degree. I have helped people when they've asked for help, to the best of my ability. But such things are a minor contribution, if one at all.

But I think most of us are leeches in a sense; we use the products of others for our own purposes and give little or nothing back. But in another sense, we aren't taking anything away from anyone by using their software. It doesn't cost the author anything when I use Vim or the GIMP or the Linux kernel, other than the cost of a file download. If I didn't use the software, they'd be in exactly the same situation as if I did. If you light a fire, and I light my own fire using yours to start it, did I take anything from you? Maybe not. Maybe it doesn't matter.

I decided to give Opera another try. How is Opera so much insanely faster than Firefox at rendering? I wish I knew the answer to that. Supposedly the 9.5 alpha is going to be faster still. It's currently hard-masked in the portage tree so I'm going to hold off trying it for a while, but that would be nice to see. Either way, even with Opera 9.23, page transitions especially are noticeably faster than Firefox, and page load times tend to be fast enough that you can appreciate the difference.

Themes in Opera are still 100x easier to find and download and install than Firefox's. And a lot of them look really good. Maybe someday Firefox will get this right. (3.0?) There are a lot of fairly minimalistic Opera skins, which is what I like. But also a lot of the typical Vista clones, and Tango and KDE/Gnome lookalikes etc. On the topic of the interface, Opera comes with way too many buttons and sidebars enabled by default, but you can strip all of that crap out of it and get something even more minimalistic than Firefox if you want.

The preferences menu of Opera reminds me a lot of KDE, in the sense that there's a config option for absolutely everything, if you're willing to dig through a thousand dialogs and collapsable trees of options to find them. I learned recently that there's an opera:config similar to Firefox's about:config which lets you get at any option you'd care to edit, which is a blessing. Plugins (e.g. Flash) seem to work OK also. I think I recall that being a problem in the past, but I didn't have to do anything to get Flash to work in Opera this time around.

Opera is not tied to Gnome/GTK, which is another immensely huge advantage in my book. The file chooser in Opera is a crappy Windows 98 lookalike built out of QT widgets, but even that is preferable to Gnome's monstrosity of a file chooser dialog. I'm pretty sure you can change which file chooser Firefox uses if you're willing to screw around enough to do it, but it's nice to have a sensible functional default.

There are a lot of other little things that Opera does right, but I don't have the time or inclination to type about them all. On the other hand I have three main problems with Opera. One, it doesn't have the large selection of extensions that Firefox does. Opera has built-in abilities that give you most of what you'd want from most Firefox extensions, but there are a few gaps here and there. Adblocking based on regex matching of URLs for example. Opera does let you right-click a page and "Block Content", and then just click everything you want to block, which works well, but I don't know of a way to use some third-party auto-updating list of ad elements to block.

Two, it has some crap built-in that I don't want. It comes with a mail client, a bittorrent client, and a "widgets" tool and I don't know how to get rid of them. You can very easily IGNORE them however. You can set any external mail app (including terminal apps) to handle mailto for example. You can also easily set apps to handle other protocols, which is typically nice of Opera to allow.

Three, I don't see an easy way to arrange which order the toolbars stack vertically. I'd like my tabs to appear directly above the web page content. You can get it to look about right by dragging all the individual buttons and toolbar elements from one toolbar to another and them removing them from the original toolbar, but that takes way too long. I'd like to be able to drag toolbars themselves around. I don't see why that should be so difficult. Firefox doesn't let you do this easily either, so oh well.

Those are minor concerns. In general Opera seems to be faster and more powerful and more configurable than Firefox. And it's cross-platform, and updates are released regularly, and it seems to be as standards-compliant as Firefox if not moreso. So why isn't Opera the most popular free browser for desktop users? It is closed source, and I'm sure that hurts it. Beyond that, not sure. Maybe people remember back when Opera was ad-infested unless you paid for it. That certainly still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. In any case, I'm going to keep trying Opera as my primary browser for a while.

I use a dark QT theme. Many web pages (example: Youtube) have CSS which sets text fields to have black text, but don't set the background color of text fields to be anything. So the background color ends up being my default dark (set by my browser / window manager), but the text in the fields is set by the page's CSS to be black, so I can't read it.

This is incredibly annoying. If sites would either set BOTH the text color and background, or NEITHER the text color nor background, things would be readable. Picking one ends up causing a mess for anyone using a dark theme.

In Firefox to fix this I have to screw around with ~/.mozilla/firefox/$PROFILE.default/chrome/userContent.css and force the font color of all my text fields to be white. This then screws up pages that style their text fields to have white backgrounds, so I have to force my background to be dark for all sites.

input {
    color: white !important;
    background: black !important;
}

However this looks horrible. Largely due to the fact that form elements in Firefox look like Windows 3.1 widgets to begin with.

In Opera on the other hand, I can go to Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Content -> Style Options... -> Enable Styling of Forms and disable all form styling on all web pages. This cause forms to revert back to their default appearance as decided by Opera. In Opera, the default appearance is often set by the theme you're using, so this is actually a nice option and gives nice-looking form widgets. You can also use a custom stylesheet in Opera similarly to Firefox where you can override the colors of form elements using CSS, if you so desire. It's in the same dialog box as the option above.

Any styling that a web page applied to make form widgets fit in better with the rest of the page is gone when do you do this kind of thing, but I'm willing to pay that price.

Previously I blabbered about how writing themes for Firefox sucks.

Now, on a related note: why is the Opera theme browser so much superior to Firefox?

Observe Opera:

In Opera the theme browser opens in a window in the application itself. You browse some themes. You pick one and click Download and it downloads right in the window there. It applies (without restarting the browser, note) and asks if you like it. If you don't, then it reverts back to the original theme.

Changing between already-installed themes involves a SINGLE CLICK in the themes dialog. You click a theme name and it applies instantly. That's it.

Observe Firefox:

When browsing/applying themes, Firefox opens up this window. Clicking the obscure "Get More Themes" text link takes you to an external URL, https://addons.mozilla.org, in my opinion one of the worst-designed theme sites I've ever seen. There, you get to browse through text links of themes on the main page (without thumbnails). Sometimes thumbnails appear on the secondary individual theme pages, and sometimes not; but not a thumbnail in sight on the main page. This means to visually browse themes (judging by, you know, what they look like rather than their name and version number), you have to click about a hundred times on all the theme links.

Once you find a theme you like, you can click the "Install Now" link on that page, in which case a dialog box appears asking if you want to install a theme from this JAR file:

Now, why in the world does it do this? I'm a borderline-OCD computer-programming geek-monster and even I don't give a crap about the URL of the JAR file I'm installing a theme from. One reason for this is that after downloading a theme JAR file, I have no idea what to do with it to get Firefox to import it. It used to be that you had to run a special page with some Javascript triggers that would import a local JAR theme file into Firefox. Then I read that you can drag-and-drop a JAR file into Firefox to install it, but this never worked in Linux and I never tried again. I don't want to screw around with this crap. I want Firefox to load the theme.

Anyways. Clicking OK to install the JAR file makes the theme magically appear in the original (separate) Themes dialog I posted a screenshot of above. And then, to try the theme, you double-click it or click Use Theme, and THEN you have to restart your browser. And if you don't like the theme, you have to restart your browser AGAIN to change the theme back.

Firefox used to let you update your theme without a browser restart. This was years ago, but I remember it. And it never worked right. Sometimes parts of the interface would change and parts wouldn't. And you'd have to restart the browser to fix it (or to discover that the theme just hosed your Firefox profile and you need to wipe it and start fresh).

Firefox got this wrong in pretty much every way. I just tested Firefox Beta2, and other than combining the Themes and Extensions windows into one window, and moving some buttons in the Themes window around, it looks exactly the same. Bad bad bad.

(IE has no themes. So it still sucks worse than both. apply "IE_Sucks" tag)

I tried Opera today (first time in a long while). It's extremely annoying in many ways, but Firefox is even MORE annoying in even MORE ways, nowadays. So I'm going to give Opera a try for a while.

It's really come a long way since last time I tried it. I still fondly remember the early days of Firefox aka Firebird aka Phoenix, and Opera always had tons more options and good stuff than Phoenix back then. Maybe I'll get used to Opera's mouse gestures again, who knows.