Firefox browser review -- missing features?

Greetings,
 
I appreciated your front-page review of the various Free web browsers in the
February 12 edition of LWN. I too gave Firefox a try this week, but I think I
must have spent a few more minutes reading the accompanying documentation,
because the various limitations and quirks you mentioned posed no problems for
me.
 
Firefox is intended to be lean and mean -- by your own admission, the
developers have accomplished that, as it is the fastest of the browsers you
tested. To get there, one presumes, they left out some of the features that
bloated the traditional Mozilla browser. However, they made sure that it
would be easy to add specific features back in using lightweight,
user-installable extension modules.
 
Your listed concerns were:
 
> [...] some things are missing. At the top of your editor's list is the
> ability to control image animation.
 
This is the very first control provided by the "Things They Left Out"
extension. It provides a lot of useful preferences settings:
http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/ttlo
 
> The download manager is a little strange; it provides no way to place a file
> in an arbitrary directory at download time.
 
The regular preferences/options screen includes an "Ask me where to save every
file" option. It's just not the default.
 
> Control-T creates a new tab, as one might expect, but it comes up blank;
> Galeon's practice of bringing up the home page in new tabs seems preferable.
 
The "Tabbrowser Extensions" provides this preference plus a ton of other
tab-related features. I previously hated tabs and disabled them as soon as I
installed any browser, but Firefox (with this extension) has converted me into
a tab user. It's here:
http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/tbe
 
There are lots of other extensions available, some useful, some less so. I
think it would be safe to say that if you can think of a feature missing from
Firefox, someone else has already thought of it and implemented it as an
extension. Just check
http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/
before complaining :).
 
Charles
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Charles Cazabon <web-letters-lwn.net@discworld.dyndns.org>
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