I like that despite my bike having ten speeds, the shifters haven’t been moved in a year. Sometimes it’s nice to just ride bike.

I like that despite having thoughts/intentions of doing Great Things™ with this domain, it’s nearer death now than it ever was. Sometimes it’s nice to let ideas pass for better ones.

Not awesome bar

The big gripe. I like minimal interface clutter – consistent fonts, appropriate white space and line-heights, no wasted UI, etc. Doubling up the auto complete entries with varying font sizes makes me cringe. Add to that the fact that I’m more of a URL sort of fella than a title sort of fella and the new location bar becomes a big kick in the groin to my workflow.

The big fix: Oldbar extension. Thank goodness. Now to figure out how to apply the same change to the download manager.

Buttons = clutter

I’m also more of a keyboard shortcut sort of fella than a point and click sort of fella. This makes that star in the location bar an unused eyesore. This seems to be the sort of feature added to make Firefox appealing to a user set still on IE than as a feature added for the benefit of existing users. Either way, one style declaration in userChrome.css removes it:

#star-button {display: none !important;}

Along the same lines, backspace and shift+backspace tend to be much more convenient to me than the browser back button. The new oversized keyhole back button slider-looking thing becomes clutter. Right clicking the toolbar, selecting customize… from the menu and then checking Use Small Icons makes it much more bearable. Though easy color changes with CSS would be nice.

ctrl++ is for text

The first time I tried resizing text in IE7 I thought I broke something when the images enlarged with it. Not what I expected and not what I wanted. Blurring/jagged images don’t make them any easier to see. Until all web graphics are resolution independent, I don’t see the point in full page zoom. Again, likely a bitter old man view of a new feature. It’s easily disabled as a default under the View-Zoom menu.

But I still love you

Minor gripes given the extensibility of the application allows for easy fixing. Some argue an application shouldn’t require these sort of customizations and that it is a sign of poor design. I’m quite happy with it. Sure, it’d be great if everyone saw everything my way from the start but at least the option to have it my way is there. Plus I get to learn a few things in the process.

And I can’t get enough of the new Get Firefox site. So good. Robots, all of them.

That is all.