Non-IE Browsers

I must admit that I usually use IE. I really like both Mozilla and Opera a lot, I think they’re probably about 99.9% right. But it’s their integration with the rest of Windows that destroys the pleasure for me.

Take Mozilla. All other Windows programs consider dashes, slashes, and other punctuation to separate words. So when you hit Ctrl-Backspace to delete backwards word-by-word, Windows and IE will consider “word-by-word” to have five parts: “word”, “”, “by”, “”, “word”. Mozilla is different from any other Windows program, because they decided to reimplement the basic text input widgets instead of using Windows built-in. Hit Ctrl-Backspace once, and all of “word-by-word” is gone. Bam! It’s especially annoying in the address bar, because URLs usually don’t have any spaces at all, so Ctrl-Backspace will delete the entire URL. There’s nothing in between deleting the whole URL and one character at a time. Sigh. I always wondered how come the developers of something like Mozilla either don’t notice or don’t care. I always notice, and I always care.

Then there’s window handling, which is something that both Opera and Mozilla do poorly, and which is enough for me to not want to use them. Regardless of the “open links in new window” setting, I can’t get Mozilla 1.1 to reliably always open links in a new window, instead of reusing a randomly picked one of my open browser windows. The thing is, with more and more applications running in browsers, I’ll have a handful of permanently open browser windows: My calendar, and my time logging application, to name just a few. And IE has a feature that, when you hit Ctrl-N to open a new window, it starts out by showing the same page that you came from. Turns out, in 90% of the cases, this is what I want. I use it as a backup, as a short-cut, or to explore multiple paths from wherever I am. Mozilla can’t be configured to have this behavior, it offers home page, blank page, or the last page for which you typed the URL or something useless like that. Bummer. Would be super-easy to implement.

While we’re at it, it annoys me that Opera insists on having all windows live within the master browser window, which de facto makes it impossible to have multiple different window sizes at once. My calendar window needs to be pretty big, because I’m using the month view. My time logger window and various other windows I want to be tall and slim, because that makes it easier to read, etc. Opera won’t let me do this.

Anyway, this was just a long rant to say how it’s the totally minor, trivial things that make Opera and Mozilla so painful for me to use in practice. IE has pain points as well, such as crashing, and how it handles cookies, but most of the time, these are easier to live with because the basic usability is in place.