Why Firefox? Why??

Today I am going to talk about some of Firefox's strange design decisions. Don't get me wrong - Firefox is a damn good piece of software, I use it everyday. Also what I will talk about can easily be fixed or ignored - it does not affect anything in the browser critically. While these decisions may not be outright controversial, they are definitely weird. Having said that, here are the strange design decisions -

1. Removal of the RSS Icon
Not so long ago, I think back in the days of Firefox 3.5, you used to get an icon when you were reading a blog or a news channel, indicating that you can subscribe to it. It was placed very conveniently in the addressbar, and it used to show up only for posts which had an RSS or atom feed. It looked something like below -

Then they decided to remove it from there, and place it in a button, which would be turned off by default. You can customize the toolbar, and bring it back from the list of available buttons. If you do that, now (since Firefox 4 till Firefox 7 at the time of writing) it looks like -

Which is good, except it takes up more space, and it does not disappear if the URL does not have a feed. It just turns gray instead, and it is much harder than the previous implementation to determine if the site has a feed or not. The good news is Firefox being extensible, allows you to bring it back, you just need to use this addon.

2. Integration of Personas
On 2009, Firefox decided to integrate Personas - a plugin that allows you to skin the browser by painting images in in the background of UI elements like menus. When it happened, there were 10s if not hundreeds of equally if not more (and I would actually argue more) useful plugins. For example, Greasemonkey, Tab Mix Plus, Download Statusbar, Shareaholic, FoxMarks (XMarks now, and they did integrate a different build of it though not with so many features - while XMarks almost died - but that's a long story). Why would you choose to include Personas in the codebase? Wouldn't these other plugins deserve the same? I understand everyone will not need to use these plugins. Well, not everyone needs Personas as well - I tried some of the skins and they look ugly anyway. Well, the good news is if you don't want to use it, it's then just an unnecessary bloat in the code (however small), and you can choose to just ignore it.

But why Firefox? Why??

Firefox 3 without Tab Mix Plus

Tab Mix Plus is one of the most popular addons for Firefox. Also it is among the most popular ones that has still not been upgraded to work with FF3.

Now it is a very powerful addon providing many features - like duplicating tabs, session management, undoing closed tabs, modifying the opening behavior to open new tabs to the right of originating tab.

Since I could not upgrade it with FF3, I was disappointed at first. However, it is not a good enoug reason for not upgrading to FF3, moreover after browsing a while I got to know certain features and workarounds - which surprisingly let me have all the features of Tab Mix Plus which I loved this addon for!

So without further ado, here's how to live without Tab Mix Plus.

Undo Closed Tabs
I was surprised to learn Firefox can already do it. However, if you had selected Tab Mix Plus to manage the sessions instead of Firefox, you won't be able to do it.

To enable Firefox session management, point your browser to about:config, ignore any warnings that Firefox may give - the warning is for novice users only which you are not - but needless to say don't screw around with the settings too much.

Find browser.sessionstore.enabled, and set it to true.

That's it, now restart Firefox, and you're done. To undo closed tabs, you can either go to History -> Recently Closed Tabs, or press Ctrl+Shift+T. If you really fancy, you can also install the Undo Closed Tabs addon which will add a menu item and a button for the same task.

Additional Tip: You can set browser.sessionstore.max_tabs_undo to something like 99 to remember more history.

Duplicate Tab
Well here you go: Duplicate Tab. This addon provides exactly the same functionality.

Maintain Tab Order
Here it is: Tab Control. This will arrange the newly opened tabs beside its parent instead of far right.

These are the main features that I have been using from Tab Mix Plus. Also I'm fairly sure that if there is anything else that you've been using, you'll find a workaround for that too if you google a bit. So happy surfing with Firefox 3!

Firefox 3 Beta 4

Firefox 3, although currently it is Beta 4 (download), is good. Two things I like about it is that it uses less memory, and it actually allows you to see the result of your password before prompting to save it. Also has revamped bookmarking system and different icons - but these I don't really care about much.

The only drawback is absence of support for FF2 addons which effectively limit functionality.

Here are the 3 things I'm looking for in FF3 before I change from FF2:

1. Undo close tab
FF3 supposedly has this, but the recent tabs in History is disabled. This can be obtained in FF2 through Tab Mix Plus.

2. Open tabs to the right of current tab
True a very simple feature, but helps tremendously in organizing tabs. Again through Tab Mix Plus.

3. Del.icio.us addon
It is the one service which I rely on and which has yet not been upgraded to support FF3.

Hope these changes are done soon. Till then, I'll keep an eye on the compatibility of addons, and I'll stick to FF2.