Firefox 4.0 Beta 1 – First Impressions

Installed Firefox 4.0 beta 1 in Mac OS X for about… 5 minutes. For now, loved the reduced size of the toolbar (heh.. where are my bookmarks?.. ok, activated it again). Then, by default text areas are now resizable by the user. Good, as some are quite small (just expanded one at the moment), bad as it can break the page layout. And finally, some problems with my favorite chess website when moving pieces.

Thunderbird 3 – the news

ThunderBird 3

I installed Thunderbird 3 a while ago. But before posting about it I thought it would good to test, check its new features usefulness and then, yes, post some comments on it. Today I decided to do the post. For that I visited the Mozilla website, searching for the top features for Thunderbird 3. They are described in the image above, and will be commented bellow:

• Tabs: at the first glance I thought that tabs would change the way I work with Thunderbird. Since when Galeon, an old web browser, added tabs to the browsing experience, that I never wanted anything else. Then, when hearing about tabs on Thunderbird 3 I got excited. But now I can’t see where are the tabs experience. I can’t add a tab with other account (I was trying to put different inboxes in different tabs) or a tab for each account. But or that is not possible, or it is too hidden for finding it. The only place where I saw tabs showing on was during search…
• Better Search: yesterday I finally discovered how to turn off the new search system. It is fancy, it shows graphics, it has a nice user interface, it does not work! Why are some mails found and not shown? Why some folders are not being indexed? Why indexes are not updated when I move a file? Last months I tried not to use the search engine because I was frustrated with it. Now, old search is back. Great.
• Archiving: the archiving feature might be interesting if the search works, something like Google Mail. In fact, they started with that idea: never delete a mail, archive anything, we will find it. Yes, it was they tagline. Now they are using tags (folders with a different name) so you can organize your email. If Google Mail did this, from an archive to a set of archives, why is Thunderbird trying to create an archive for everything? I use for years different folders where I copy mails to, organizing them as I like. If just these folders were indexed…

OK, now I wonder: why did I update? Probably I will ask the same about Firefox 3.6. Please, Mozilla! Look into usability. Look into usefulness. Forget fancy and eye catching features that use resources and have no real use!

iFrames and JavaScript fail?

Was trying to create the typical button to “remove frames” from a site, opening the main iframe content in the full window. While it was easy to make the iframe content to change with a simple HTML link and a target property, it is not easy to make the “remove frames” button to work.

I tried a simple JavaScript function that retrieves the ‘src’ property from the ‘iframe’ object and assigns it to the document location. Unfortunately, it seems that both Firefox and Chrome does not update the iframe DOM object with the correct url property when the user clicks in one link that uses the “target” property.

My current solution would be to change the links with target property to JavaScript actions. But that is insane.

Am I doing something wrong? And, this is a bug or a feature?