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So much Firefox hate I don't know where to start. Actually, yes, I do. With the input focus, which is broken in different ways on every single copy of Firefox for Linux that I've used. The precise strain of breakage varies from version to version, and also, apparently, with the phase of the moon and whether you feeling lucky. So when Firefox suddenly decides not to let you get focus on anything, you've got to try to remember: is this the box where I can just move focus to another window and back to fix it? Or is this the one where I've got to type adsfasdf in the address bar and then click on the page body? Or the one where I've got to hit escape after typing ' or / in a text box because Firefox has decided that means it should open a "Find Text As You Type" box, input focus be damned? Or maybe the one where I've got to sacrifice a virgin and chant the GPL in its entirety, backwords, in Basque? On my machine at work, Firefox is unusable because it becomes impossible to gain focus anywhere in the application -- on the page, in the address bar, on a menu -- if I open more than one window. Close all but one and it starts working again. I could use tabs, but I hate tabs, because they steal vertical space and I've already got enough crap cluttering up the top of my browser window, and anyway I run a civili^H^H^H^H^H^H marginally-less-hateful-than-average window manager which makes application-level tabs redundant. So I can't use Firefox for anything except viewing one site at a time in one window. So I use Epiphany. Being built on top of Gecko, it too is possessed of demented focus issues, but at least it seems to be able to fairly reliably snap out of it when I enter text in the address bar. And so all was well, until last week, when it started giving me "DCOM gurgle CORBA wheeze Can't open socket moan" errors on load, and then proceeding to start without the menu, toolbar, or address bar. (Ctrl-L will make it appear, ephemerally, until I enter a URL, at which point it goes away again). I also, since last week, have to click through three or four modal Gnome "Can't open socket" error dialogs if I hit Ctrl+F to open a search box. [1] I have vague memories of being able to fix a similar problem in the past, by killing gconfd-2 -- or was it gconfd-1? isn't it grand to live in an era where the importance of using informative names for things is so universally recognized? -- or possibly by removing some files and/or sockets buried somewhere under /tmp, or maybe some combination of the above -- but dammit, I don't want to have to know that much about Gnome, I just want a goddamned browser that works. 1. Epiphany, I believe, is the "minimal" Gnome browser [2], forked by parties who felt that Galeon was too bloated. "Minimal," to me, seems at odds with "has to open a new socket to render a Find In Page dialog," but what do I know. 2. Remeber when Firefox was Phoenix? And it was supposed to be the "minimal" version of Mozilla? Which was the supposed to be a stripped-down interface to Netscape Communicator's rendering engine? Does "minimal" now mean "does not require liquid coolant to run?"
Generated at 20:01 on 27 Jun 2006 by mariachi 0.52