Mozilla still not perfect

I went to mozilla.org to gripe about the multiple petty ways in which Mozilla 1.2.1, the “latest and greatest” stable release, is less convenient to my fingers than the much-maligned Netscape Communicator 4.79; but was put off by the helpful Bug Writing Guidelines:

. . . be sure that you’ve reproduced your bug using a build released within the past three days.

I’m not quite motivated enough (or awake enough) to install and test an alpha version. Oh well.

What am I griping about? Glad you asked – gotta fill up my blogging quota somehow.

• In the Bookmarks editor, the ‘Last Visited’ column is blank; the ‘Added’ column shows the last visit, but I cannot sort on that column. A major nuisance: this is was how I keep kept track of the many sites that I like to visit periodically.
• Cursor keys and Page keys sometimes do not scroll the window unless I have clicked in the content pane. I expect that of a page with frames – but in mail?
• When I reply to mail that has a standard .signature (beginning with “−− ”), the dash and everything below it is cut off. One can see why this was thought desirable, but it ought to be optional, because:
  • I have one correspondent who uses << AOL-style quoting >> (material for another day’s rant) and never trims anything. The stuff to which I’d want to respond is below my sig, and thus cut off. (This wouldn’t happen if he used more standard quoting, because a sigdash with a prefix is no longer a sigdash.)
  • I’m on one digested list; guess what happens to the posts low in a digest.
• In text-input boxes (including mail), control-left always moves to the beginning of a word, but control-right from the end of a word just steps over the whitespace. So it takes twice as many strokes to move right as to move left across the same text. Why??
• Where’s rot13?
• Netscape Communicator shows the length of a mail item down to the byte; this is sometimes useful. Mozilla rounds to the kilobyte, saving one character.

Strange window behaviors:

• I don’t know whether this is Mozilla’s fault or Blogger’s (though it didn’t happen in 4.79): When I go to ‘Publish’ this mess, the ‘login’ popup appears and then hides itself behind the main window!
• I often have several browser windows open at once. When one of them reports a failure, the offending window comes to the front (just behind the error dialog). In NS4.79, it stays in front so I can close it. In Moz1.21, that window goes to the back when I dismiss the error dialog; so I can either
  • guess which window it was, find it and close it, or
  • wait until any windows in front of it have been closed, and then try to remember why it’s blank.
• I finish what I was doing in one window and push it to the back. The first window then pops forward again to let me know that it has, as I expected, refreshed.

That’ll do for now. At least Control-Plus now works, so I can defeat the artistic vision of people who went to the trouble of making their text too small for me to read comfortably.