waider

I've finally given in and run up Firefox on the Mac.

Why?

Because I can no longer access either my online banking or my motor tax renewal forms with Safari. Who'd have thought I'd be driven to open-source technology by a bank and local government?

Here in my Firefox window I have some highlighted text. In my head this is, perhaps, the X Primary selection. For a transient period in time it is also X Cut Buffer 0. From Firefox's context menu I've selected Copy, so it should now also be in the X Clipboard selection. However, in the Emacs buffer I wanted to paste to, it is not in any of these places. I don't know where it is. Why is this, exactly? I've read what is probably the clearest doc available on what should be happening (Note that despite the fact that Emacs has scragged the X Primary selection through a kill operation in another window, the text remains highlighted in Firefox). Someone here is not reading from the correct hymn sheet, and I want them found and shot, because if I select and copy text I fully expect it to be available to the next application that says, "insert clipboard contents here". Of course, it could well be that emacs, in its wisdom, is scragging the X Primary selection, X Cut Buffer 0, and the Clipboard all in one go... gah.

It's too damned big.

I have a larger problem with the Mozilla family: they all identify their windows as whatever the top-level window is. In other words, for me, the Firefox main window identifies as Firefox-bin, as does the Calendar window. In Mozilla it used be that the browser identified as navigator:browser and the mail client as mail:3pane; now they all identify as Mozilla-bin.

( Why does this matter? )

while I'm whining about cookies... it'd be nice if I could tell mozilla to never, ever accept a cookie of the form "*WEBTRENDS*" or something.

Yay. There's a new version of Flash. Boo, it hangs when I take Mozilla to http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/ and click on "previous date". So much for progress. Even the old version didn't do this once I'd allowed it (or Mozilla, I don't know which) to invoke esd despite the fact that I tend to use a perfectly good artsd for my audio serving pleasure.

I have a whole assload of bookmarks. Some of them have been following me around since the late '90s. I try to keep them organised, but there are dupes, dead links, etc. So I thought I'd do a little consolidation with Mozilla. Use the search to find duplicate bookmarks, then delete all but one copy.

You can't do that. For reasons best understood at Mozilla.org, you can't delete bookmarks once the search is active. Actually, depending on your Mozilla version, you may not be able to delete bookmarks at all.

Ok, so plan B. I noticed that the "Move..." menu option was enabled in search mode. So I created a folder called Junk and moved my duplicate bookmarks in there. Then I exited search mode and emptied the Junk folder. Then I activated search mode and searched for the same bookmarks, and lo... there's now an extra copy. Lather, rinse, repeat, and after a few cycles I've got 8 copies of a bookmark that I've been trying to kill outright. GAH. How hard is this stuff to do right?

I just got a bunch of mails from Bugzilla because "[bugzilla.mozilla.org]'s policy is not to use [the CLOSED] status. Obviously this is WAY more important than, say, fixing bugs.

Phrases like "Let's keep knowledge of the content-type header out of the loader ok?" are hugely unhelpful in the context of the end-user. It's like saying, "Let's maintain ideological code purity at the expense of the user experience, okay?".

May I refer you to an appropriate Jerkcity cartoon, particularly the final frame.

Mozilla does another about turn.