Something has been bugging me since I started using Firefox, and Thunderbird, and sadly it has little to do with the actually application, but rather the site for both of the applications.
The first was the Mozilla team’s decision to use the same file extension for their application extensions (plugins). Why is this annoying? Go install both Firefox, and Thunderbird, open Thunderbird, and select the “Get Extensions”. Now, from inside firefox, select any extension, and click it… Firefox will then proceed to complain it’s not compatible. Of course, they put instructions on what to do with the instructions (save to disk, yada yada), but why do I have to jump through an extra 3 steps, when I can simply click a link for Firefox to perform the same operation?
The second, again related to extensinos, is their site. Go to the Mozilla main site , and click on Add-ons. It defaults to Firefox. While I know the majority of people will want Firefox add-ons, it’s relatively easy to click on the Thunderbird link on the side… Here is the kicker… Go back to the main page, and click on the “New! Thunderbird 2” link, and then click on Add-ons… it still takes you to Firefox.
A third minor annoyance is related to the “crashed” restarts. Sometimes it’s nice to resume a session after the browser has crashed, however, I’ve never done it… And in fact, I think Firefox has only crashed on me twice in the 2 years I’ve been using it. At least, crashed in the sense that it generated an error whilst I was using it. I get the “restore” stuff quite frequently. Sometimes I’ll close firefox, and restart it 15 minutes later to it. It didn’t crash, or at least not a visible crash, I had actually asked it to close. Then there is the incidents of closing it, and it not actually closing. I know in those cases, it’s usually a third party plugin (flash, java, etc), so I’ll let it off there. Another time I usually get the resume sessions is right after start up. I know exactly why too. I often shut down windows, with several applicatinos running. Why? Because Windows tells the other apps to close before it shuts down. If it doesn’t respond in a timely manor, it prompts the user to terminate them. Firefox has never prompted me to terminate it in this incident, but on start-up, considers this a “crash”.
I’m sure the crash stuff has an entry in the about:config, that can disable it, but I’d sure love an entry in the generatl settings to manage it. The other two issues are probably minor, and just something that gets under my nose… oh well… [/rambling rant]