Bremsstrahlung

I'll start out by saying that I don't consider Firefox near as great as people say it is. It's noticeably slower than Safari and doesn't support my many-windowed browsing style very well. I also hate its behavior for updating itself; unlike Applications which use Sparkle for updates, Firefox only allows an update to be postponed once. Oddly, Firefox 2 doesn't prompt the user at all to upgrade to version 3, and so I was still using 2 as of the start of today.

Another problem I've had is that I fight a constant battle it seems to get Firefox to not draw big ugly outlines around images used as links on some other parts of my site. I've fixed this more than once, only to have it break again. Today was another breakage day. What I realized this time around was that having an equivalent to Safari's Web Inspector would help me find out far more quickly why Firefox thinks my style calls for or allows big ugly outlines. I use Firefox so seldom that I'd never installed an add-on before, but I hear that Firebug is good, so I looked it up. I was informed, however by the fine print:

Upgrade Firefox to use this add-on

Well, okay, maybe it is about time for me to upgrade to version 3. I clicked he handy upgrade link, which sent me to a download page. The download tried to start automatically, but failed. This was because I have disabled write access for my Downloads folder¹. No matter, I tried to do what I always do in Firefox, and manually download the linked file to the Desktop instead of the default download location. Doing so, I get a document named 'click here.htm'. Uh, that sure doesn't sound right. . . Opening it reveals: 17.2 Mb of binary gibberish. It actually is the FF3 disk image, but utterly, appallingly mislabeled.

At this point I got to wondering if maybe I should just make Firefox happier by letting it download to the desktop by default, so I opened up the preferences. Only to find that the Desktop is already the default download location. Yes, in spite of my quite clear preference, Firefox downloads to the Downloads folder anyway.

All in all, FF2 is so screwed up that I cannot simply use it to install FF3. THis supposedly the greatest browser ever to grace the internet? I sure hope version 3 has some major improvements. Now that I've used Safari to download it, I can actually find out.