Firefox 3.0 aggravations

[Steve Lamb]

On Thu, June 19, 2008 11:15 am, Chris Mohler wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 12:25 PM, Steve Lamb <grey at dmiyu.org> wrote:
>>    Nope.  Even worse, it doesn't recognize URLs that have teritary
>> domains.

> That's not true (about subdomains) - I type "cp" and "cp.vpsland.com"
> is first in the list.

    Is that with Opera or FF?  I was talking about Opera at that point.

> I have mixed feelings about the "smart bar", but I'm giving it the
> benefit of the doubt and trying to learn/train it - it does save time
> in some situations.

    Oh, I know it can be trained.  Thing that chaps my hide, really, is that
there was vocal opposition to this change and they were told that it was
going forward, there would be no way to get the old behavior back and,
my take on it, "Suck it up, you don't matter."

    Read https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=407836 to see how
vocal that opposition is in the bug tracking area.  Then look at the 35
page webboard topic at
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=640174&st=0&sk=t&sd=a
to see even more. 
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=3311450#p3311450 is my
favorite response.  Someone asks to have the option to get FF2 behavior
and a mod tells 'em flat out, not going to happen.

    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=403159 is also telling
especially comment #11.  "I totally understand your use case, and why
this change makes that task considerably more difficult.  However, I'm
pushing for this change based on the notion that all of the various
people who have told me that Firefox is their favorite search engine
don't scan a list of URLs, nor do they make a navigation decision based
on the URL itself."

    Comment #13, "We want to get the UI ready for integrating matches
against the page text in future releases."

    Basically the FF devs are being extremely myopic about this.  They want
to push it forward in spite of the not inconsiderable opposition to it. 
That is what is bugging me the most about this.  They ask how to improve
the current implementation and when people, repeatedly, tell them to
make it like the old implementation the devs say no.  Heck, even now the
current implementation is getting so convoluted in an attempt to address
issues people bring up it is absurd.  They actually want to put
punctuation into the bar to have meaning to direct the search algorithm
on where to search.  Even then it still will be a complete strings
search and not a beginning of URL search.

    Madness, simply madness.

-- 
Steve Lamb