Firefox rant!
Who here uses firefox? I do. I've used it for so long that I can hardly remember using anything else. Although now I'm very tempted to look for alternatives.

I run CentOS 4 at home and at work. Recently an update from firefox 1.0 to 1.5 was pushed to CentOS 4. On of the first things I noticed is that several text widgets (and pulldowns from text widgets) have changed colors. They seemed to make all the gray ones white and the white ones gray, for no apparent reason. But whatever, I'm not a good judge of style, and I can get used to this. So I push on.

Then today, I found something truly terrifying. Firefox is becoming IE. I tried to go to a website that isn't available. Instead of a nice popup giving me the error message, it loaded a fake page saying 'Unable to connect' and giving me a list of possible things that might be wrong. This is supposed to be a 'friendly' page. However, telling the user the problem might be their fault or might be the other ends fault and we don't know isn't very friendly. Its very very frustrating. Especially when I'm an experience sysadmin who understands normal sane error messages. However, when apps try to guess what's wrong, they don't leave me in a good place for me to figure out if they're sane or not.

However, maybe the old error messages were annoying to some people. I personally liked it if a tab had a slow time loading and I switched tabs that eventually firefox would pop up an error message if the page didn't load. Maybe others didn't. So I go looking around, assuming there's something in the options that will at least let me have firefox. Do you know what I found? That's right! Nothing. Not a single option to let me see what the real error from the Operating System was. This inability has been one of the things I hate the most about IE for years. And now its come to firefox. At least with IE you can get it to print the real error message at the bottom of the fake one.

In general, I'm not opposed to improvements and learning changes in apps. However, when applications go from standard error messages with well understood meanings to "friendly" error messages that leave the user more confused than a simple "Connection Refused", then I'm not really sure that's an improvement. And if you're going to do that, at least give us experience users a chance to get the *sane* error messages that we understand.