While I am pretty happy with the Opera 9.5 series, it is always good to explore all the options. With Firefox 3’s semi-recent release, I thought I would take it for a spin. I haven’t played with many of the add-ons as of yet, but I do like FoxClocks (Red Ferret Referrer) which displays my choice of world time clocks. Like Drfaulken I prefer Firefox’s built-in spellchecker over Visual.SpellCheck though the little red lines in Firefox are easy miss. At some point during the evolution of Wordpress, Visual.SpellCheck started eating alt and the ending slash out of my image tags which was causing my XHTML 1.0 strict validation to fail. Continue reading for some of the things that annoy(ed) me and any workarounds that I found.

First, the things that annoyed me that I could “fix”. Tabs hiding in a menu when the tab width threshold was crossed was a bit irritating. With about:config Firefox allows this and many other settings to be modified Lifehacker posted Top Firefox 2 config tweaks back when Firefox 2 was released in 2006 noting that setting browser.tabs.tabMinWidth to 0 disables this behavior. Also in the article was mention of setting browser.tabs.closeButtons to 2 in order to disable tab close buttons. Usually I either close whole browser windows or command + w when I want to close an individual tab. 95% of the time when I hit the ‘x’ in the tab bar, its a mis-click and an annoyance. I have since disabled this in Opera as well.

I also had some trouble with my self-signed roclar.net SSL cert. There have been numerous threads, including this one on Slashdot complaining about how Firefox 3 handles SSL certificates particularly self-signed ones. I am not going to get into that debate, once I deleted the saved roclar.net cert from the certificate manager and re-added it, I didn’t have any further problems.

The biggest annoyance I have with Firefox at the moment is I cannot open links in background windows. Right-clicking a link in Opera presents the option of “Open in Background Window” in the list, Firefox only allows to open in the foreground. There is a plugin, Open link in… but it seems to have focus issue with Firefox 3.0.1. Any time you try clicking the background window, Firefox refocuses on the previous window you were in. Thus far I haven’t found any other options, and its not that debilitating a problem.

The only other problem I have had thus far is sometimes input text boxes stop working. The cursor disappears and you cannot click in the text field. I remember this happening back in the Firefox 1.5.x days. It seems to be happening less frequently now, but when it does happen its not fun. Sometimes you can cycle to other windows to get text entry back, sometimes you have to close that particular browser window.

Overall, not too shabby. At some point I want to play with more plugins (any suggestions anybody?). Unless I find an extension that is truly ground breaking, I will probably continue using both Opera and Firefox.