Firefox Test Releases on Fedora

Benjy Grogan benjy.grogan at gmail.com
Thu Apr 6 00:25:55 UTC 2006


Dear Fedora Developers,

I've noticed some funny problems with Firefox on Fedora.  Nothing
catastrophic but not as user friendly as Firefox on Windows XP.  I
list the problems below.  But I think it would be a good idea to have
Firefox 2.0 test releases available in an experimental repository for
FC5 so that they could get testing before Firefox 2.0 is released in
September.  This idea is similar to the AIGLX repository available for
AIGLX's testing, and also similar to the inclusion of Gnome
development branches in rawhide.  I've been trying unsuccesfully to
get a CVS build of Firefox to work on FC5, but for whatever reason
after all is done it redirects to Firefox 1.5.0.1.

But here are the minor nuisances I've experienced with Firefox 1.5.0.1 on FC5:

1) The middle button on the mouse doesn't allow the scroll button to
appear, so that I can navigate up and down long web pages.

2) The middle button on the mouse doesn't allow other tabs to be
closed simply by middle-button-clicking the tabs.

3) Certain keywords, such as 'wp linux' to look up Linux in Wikipedia
don't work.

4) If I drag selected text into the search box at the top of Firefox
it will automatically begin to search for that text in the current
tab.  In fact, I actually want to go to another new tab before
beginning the search, and from that new tab I will activate the search
box.  This isn't a problem on Windows XP.

5) Occasionally web sites unintentionally become draggable.  Then the
only thing to do is drag the draggable to the tab where it is already
shown.  I think it happens because you click on a new tab, and then
accidentally drag the new tab outside of it's place.  For whatever
reason, this never happens to me on Windows XP.

So Firefox doesn't have the same polish as Windows XP, but overall
it's highly functional.  I think it's more important to have test
releases of Firefox 2.0 available to testers so that all those nasty
bugs that can only be rooted out by long term use of a test release
are in fact rooted out.

Benjy




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