[vox-tech] Re: vox-tech Digest, Vol 9, Issue 2

[Bill Kendrick]

Alex posted from an address that is not subscribed to vox-tech...

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Date: Wed, 02 Feb 2005 13:20:18 -0800
From: Alex Mandel <tech_dev at wildintellet.com>
Subject: Re: [vox-tech] Re: vox-tech Digest, Vol 9, Issue 2
To: lugod's technical discussion forum <vox-tech at lists.lugod.org>

Norm Matloff wrote:

>Concerning Firefox:
>
>I've been using it almost exclusively for several months now (I mainly
>used Mozilla before that), and I really like it.  My complaint, though,
>is that the documentation is awful.
>
>For example, I discovered by accident that one can do a text search
>within the currently-displayed page by using the vi `/' command!  Yep,
>hit the slash key as one would do in vi, and Firefox will search for the
>text you type.  In fact, it does it incrementally, and stops you if
>you've typed so much that the string doesn't exist.  And, instead of an
>annoying popup window for the search, a search box appears WITHIN the
>current window, at the bottom.  
>
>All that is nice, but I discovered it purely by accident.  I'm so used
>to using the / key to do searches in vim that I unthinkingly did so in
>FF, and thus stumbled onto this cool feature.  But it does not seem to
>be in the documentation.  In fact, as far as I know, there IS no full
>documentation even available.  (Please correct me if I am wrong on
>this.)
>
>One thing that FF does much better than the old Mozilla or Konqueror is
>the installation of plug-ins, which FF partially automates.  But it
>still is poor relative to IE or for that matter Opera.  And even though
>FF has a plug-ins help page, which IS rather helpful, it is still lacking.
>
>Norm
>
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>vox-tech mailing list
>vox-tech at lists.lugod.org
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> 
>
I've had pretty good luck finding Documentation for Firefox. Your / 
trick is actually listed http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/keyboard
The support pages and knowledgebases have a lot of tricks explained too, 
although the format is a bit different than maybe the documentation I've 
seen for a lot of linux stuff, like customization of the user.js (ie how 
to share a profile between linux and windows on a multiboot machine)

My cents on the subject are mainly to remind everyone that the purpose 
of Firefox is to boost development in a somewhat stagnant market. 
Firefox isn't intended to replace Mozilla but rather rebuild it better 
and allow people the option of running a superlite browser on any 
system. That goes for Thunderbird too. Can you picture it now, the next 
version of Mozilla actually being firefox and thunderbird on the backend 
with all the add ons Mozilla typically has, plus popular new home brewed 
add ons bundled with no install needed. That explains why the add ons 
and plugins can be cumbersome occasionally.

I've been very happily using Firefox on windows and occasionaly linux 
and mac for 2 years now and I wouldn't dream of touching IE except for 
the occasional IE only pages, but that's the web designer's fault for 
not being compliant. Last I heard though firefox took 5% of the market 
in 5 months last year, dropping IE to 90% of all computers from its grip 
at 95% that its had since mid 1990s, maybe web designers will think 
twice before using Frontpage for everything.

Alex


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