September 13, 2008: Muttering About Firefox

I really like the idea of software maintained by a community. Therefore, I wish to be a Firefox loyalist. But they sure made my head hurt with their latest release.

Version 3.0 features what they call a "smart" location bar. I would call it a very stupid location bar. With the 2.0 location bar, if you typed an S, you got all recently visited sites whose URLs start with S. Well and good.

Now, you seem to get all recently visited sites with an S in the URL!!

So I promptly switched back to the old version. This involved downloading an archive that unpacked into a disk image on my Mac. So I opened the disk image, and what did I see? One word: "Firefox," repeated twice. Two instances of the Firefox logo, one color, one black and white. And an arrow pointing to a folder marked with what I recognized as the symbol Apple is currently using to mean "Applications."

Well, I figured it out. What they were trying to say was "This disk image contains one item. Grab it and move it to your applications folder."