|
|
||
Firefox-GTK Again—Day 62© Copyright Darrell Anderson. I have almost run out of patience with the GTK version of Firefox. Firefox runs well on my Windows setup, but the GTK version is an ogre. Firefox is not the darling many people would have us believe. There are several reasons why Firefox-GTK frustrates me. The most noticeable is that all menu selections require about a half a second or more to respond. So noticeable that one would think I was running all of this on an old 386 box. I hate the GTK file open and save dialog boxes. Compared to the beautiful KDialog boxes, they are ugly. Frustratingly, I know of no way to force them to default to showing hidden files and directories. I must manually toggle that check box every time. I know about the userChrome.css tweak to reverse the order of the OK and Cancel buttons, but that is a small victory. The general asthetics of GTK is awful. The progress bar in GTK looks amateurish compared to the Windows version. The Firefox-GTK download manager is one of the ugliest pieces of software I have seen. Another detriment is that the longer I maintain a Firefox session, the more sluggish Firefox becomes. I have to exit and restart Firefox to regain some snappiness, but this solution does not always work. Even after I check the KDE System Guard or the command line top or ps to verify no instances of Firefox are running. There have been times when the Find tool fails to work although I am staring directly at the text string I am searching. Several times I have tried to open web pages and Firefox does nothing. Just nothing. Related, some pages have opened only to a blank page. I looked at the HTML and there is no meta data or code between the body tags. I open the same pages with Konqueror with no issues. This is not the infamous “file not found,” “connection refused,” or ipv6 problem. I receive no such messages and the status bar indicates the page loaded. There simply is no HTML data in the page. Several times I have tried to scroll pages using either the Page Down key or the mouse, but instead of moving only one screen, the document rapidly scrolls to the very end or several screens. Several extensions fail to work with Firefox-GTK. Because of my dial-up connection, I enjoy the Extended Statusbar extension. Although not entirely accurate, the extension helps me gauge the progress of page rendering. The sound extension also fails. Often sounds get “backlogged.” That is, after loading pages in the background I hear no sounds until after I open a different page and then the sounds all start cascading one after the other as if they are bottled up in a queue. The sounds are also awfully crackly. None of these problems exist with my Windows version of Firefox. Thus, I now am left without a dependable browser. Konqueror does not provide me some of the essential usability tools I demand such as a context menu option to open pages in both the background or foreground. I previously shared my frustrations with trying to configure Konqueror profiles. Mozilla is a logical choice, but the primary reason for using Firefox is to eliminate all the overhead I don’t need or want with Mozilla. Many extensions don’t work with Mozilla and theme selection is not the greatest either. I am now at a critical stage in my migration. I can use Word under WINE but am unable to concurrently use the VB editor to recreate the writing environment I have in Windows. There are other bugs and issues with WINE that I have been unable to resolve. Learning and migrating to OpenOffice will require many months. Not only in converting my skills, but my templates, styles, and macros. However, I am not yet convinced that I actually want to migrate to OpenOffice. Without a dependable browser, I have no incentive to convert email to a GNU/Linux program. With my distaste for Firefox-GTK, I certainly am not going to investigate Thunderbird. Even if I later experiment successfully with running Windows from a second box within a VNC viewer window, I would be running all three of my staple tools from Windows, not GNU/Linux. I might as well just run the Windows only. I enjoy the environment of GNU/Linux and particularly Slackware. However, I am limited in what I can do within that environment to be productive, other than continue my basic education. There are several KDE tools and utilities I’d like to have in Windows, but I have no desire to continue playing the dual boot game. I might as well resign myself to continue using my stable and rock-solid NT4 system. Finis. |
||