[lug] Ubuntu Firefox v10.0.x Sluggishness & Fix (rantish)

[Rob Nagler]

I've been using Chrome as my main browser for a couple of months now
on my Mac.  Here are my opinions FWIW:

Cons:

- It has emacs keybindings, but it doesn't treat ^K like FF does.  In
emacs, when I write text, it autowraps so ^K does the right thing.  In
FF and C, there's no autowrap, which I like, but when you do ^K, C
deletes the whole paragraph, whereas FF deletes to the end of the
visible line.  I use ^K a lot so it's really annoying.

- The auto complete in the address bar is a bit strange.  It goes to
Google directly instead of just giving me a few choices in a drop
down.  It also remembers what I've looked at, but mixes that with
results it thinks I would like to know.  I don't find it "intuitive".

- C caches too much.  I find that I sometimes can't get it to refresh
correctly and have to restart.  (FF does cache DNS too much, but that
I'm used to. :)

- Some sites simply don't work on C.  I was on Godaddy last night, and
Godaddy got some type of form submission errors twice, which could be
GD, but I have a suspicion with all the JS that's on their pages that
Chrome did the wrong thing.  I had something similar on Amazon with
their filter buttons on the left.  They just didn't work one day in C.
 I've even found Gmail to be quirky.

-The way it handles certs and plugins is clunky, I agree.

- Can't turn off icons in bookmarks bar.  In FF, I used to be able to
do that with a preference, now I can do it with CSS, but I don't know
how to do that in C.

- It renders PDFs itself in a new tab.  It's PDF viewer isn't nearly
as good as Preview on the Mac so I have to right click, save, open,
which is hard to remember.  I guess I could figure out how to turn
this off.

- Scrolling is a bit odd.  If there's an inner iframe with a scroll
bar, C seems to decide which scrollbar I want to use (with gestures,
not licks) dynamically, and it's trying to be too clever.  I'd rather
be explicit, but then it's really quite hard to deal with two
scrollbars so perhaps there's nothing to do here.

Pros:

+ Nice validation structure, and the way it does View Source (except
the keystroke shortcut requires fifteen fingers :).

+ I like preferences, history, etc. being just another tab.

+ It's faster than FF, and doesn't soak up the resources like FF does.
 That's the main reason I switched.  C doesn't seem to wedge itself
like FF does.

+ It's made by Google, and I love all things Google. ;-)

+ Download bar is kind of nice

I'm pretty sure there are other subtleties that I've just gotten used
to.  Those are the things that come to mind.

Rob