Alert boxes now tab-modal in Firefox 4 | Hacker News Reader

Alert boxes now tab-modal in Firefox 4

bugzilla.mozilla.org

62 pointsab937 comments

I think this is one of many problems that would go away if window managers simply provided tabs as first-class objects. I am tired of every app having to "support" tabs, and inevitably see quirky behavior.

Not only would this fix alert problems, but we'd gain a lot of other capabilities. The biggest one for me would be, inter-application tabs: why shouldn't my tab stack be able to alternate between mail, terminals, editors and web browsers, for instance?

Are you aware of the window managers that do provide this?

I've tried them, and I never really liked it. But I don't think you need to be complaining, because what you are asking for already exists, and switching over shouldn't be hard.

I know that some window managers are capable of it. Though I use Macs primarily, so I want Apple to fix it. :) Realistically though, cross-platform products like Firefox would need Windows and all Unix/Linux window managers to handle this too, in order to completely avoid home-grown code to mimic tabs.

Tab Candy. I know that right now it's a Firefox feature, but it should be a window manager.

fluxbox had this 5 years ago

Isn't that essentially the same thing as the taskbar? I think people appreciate tabs because they can still get to their separate programs easily from the taskbar, but inside the application itself we can also easily switch between contexts (spreadsheets, web pages, etc.)

Windows 7's new taskbar has some features that go in the direction of exposing those application-level contexts to the system-wide taskbar. Try Fx4 on Win7 and each tab acts like a new Firefox window, and Win7's new stacking mechanism makes it so you can easily switch to other apps even if you have 100 tabs open.

Right, there's this type of application:window divide in OS X which is really nice. There's two levels of window switching, between-applications and between-app-windows that beats the pants off of the "traditional" taskbar model seen in XP and most Linux distros. Mixing windows and applications in alt-tab generally just causes tons of problems in trying to guess which is on top of the stack, not to mention that application switching screws up window switching.

I hear Windows 7's taskbar is much more dock-like, which would be a serious benefit, I get actual headaches from working with XP at work 9 hours a day.

OS X which is really nice... beats the pants off of the "traditional" taskbar model seen in XP and most Linux distros

That's a matter of personal preference. I personally loathe the way OSX forces me to decide between Apple-Tab vs Apple-Tilde. I just want to switch.

But to be fair, it's absolutely annoying and stupid Microsoft Office applications decide they need two entries in the stack. For example, why does having n Excel workbooks open require n+1 entries? No other applications do that as far as I know.

Same with MSN Messenger but they fixed that in the latest version.

Sometimes 10-year-old problems do get fixed. Glad to see that Mozilla is continuing to take browser making seriously.

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. (Why the downvotes? It's an honest question. Firefox has stagnated and is falling behind in features and performance. Simple but major UX frustrations like this seem bewildering when I load up Firefox for a casual surf instead of Chrome.)

it's not sarcasm

It should be. Every other browser gets this problem correct and has. My other comment here is more verbose, but Firefox has become something of a monolithic joke. Every time I fire it up, I'm truly hopeful that it will have improved. Then 30 seconds later when it has finally opened, I see the same tired Firefox2/3.x interface and slow page rendering on top of the (well, now fixed) modal problems, etc.

It's nice to see that the JS speedups have some effect, but it's still behind Chrome technically. (though there do seem to be a (very, imo) few Firefox extensions that don't have Chrome equivalents, so I do understand).

I say this every time someone comments with very slow Fx startups, and I know this isn’t the elegant way to fix the problem, but 30 secs to start a browser is broken behaviour. Have you tried creating a new Firefox profile?

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Managing+profiles

hehe, It's a fresh install of Firefox 4. It clears my cache, cookies, history, etc on close. No extensions, personas, or themes. It's as clean as it gets, and it is still that broken.

30 seconds is an exaggeration but it's easily 5 times as slow as Chrome is to start up.

Far from it. I think it's great that they don't simply forget problems from 10 years ago, but that they're able to return to and fix them. It'd be better if they didn't take 10 years to do so, but then again, I'm not complaining, either.

To me, Firefox (4) with Panorama is the best UI a browser's ever had.

I'm pretty sure opera has had this for a while.

This issue was actually central to my switch to Chrome.

I'm glad it's finally fixed, but when something this important to UI takes over 10 years to get resolved, perhaps the Firefox team needs to just choose a fix (such as the ones suggested in that thread from 2002-2005) and fix any issues it causes in further releases.

Really annoying when it happens, although I've always found it possible to click ok in the alert box, and hammer ctrl+w(to close the tab) and it usually works. Sometimes it takes a bunch of ok->ctrl+w combinations before it takes, but it works. Good with a real fix for it though.

I just hope it will make the basic auth username/password-boxes tab-modal as well.

It would be nice if they made it easier to disable all alerts (it is possible, but takes a bit of reading to work out). In general I hate their use.

10 years is too long though for a simple thing like this.

Ahh, Firefox is finally catching up to Opera. ;)

This is a cheap, troll comment but it summarizes my views on Firefox. For a browser that started out in Linux, the lack of decent start times, page render times, and the same old tired Firefox 3.x interface in Firefox 4 is a huge slap in the face.

Now that Chrome will only load Flash on demand (and performance and stability of Linux Flash in Chrome is hugely improved as a result)... there is literally no reason for me to use Firefox 4.

For me, Firefox Sync and Zotero are the two must-haves that Chrome doesn't match at all. Firefox Sync goes so far beyond any other sync tool I've ever seen, it's incredible. Likewise, Zotero's browser-level integration is immensely helpful in research. There are, of course, other reasons why I like Firefox, but those two are what render Firefox essential.

Chrome’s sync does more and more all the time. What does Firefox Sync do for you? Genuinely curious.

The big one is syncing of passwords and preferences in an encrypted manner. It means that I can nearly transparently switch computers while still using secure randomly-generated passwords for each site. Last I checked that was not supported by Chrome Sync, but if I'm out of date with that, I'd love to know.

Yes, it does password and autofill sync now.

Does Google know about your passwords?

You can enable client side encryption. At this point you'll have to give chrome a password the first time it wants to sync, but google wouldn't know your passwords.

On a related note: what exactly is the business value for google to abuse your trust and misuse the passwords you've given them in the course of non-client-side encrypted password sync?

> On a related note: what exactly is the business value for google to abuse your trust and misuse the passwords you've given them in the course of non-client-side encrypted password sync?

No one else in the world knows my passwords. Period.

So use the client side encryption.

Chrome Sync does everything that Firefox Sync does, but Zotero looks (really, really cool, but sadly) unsupported. There always seem to be those few extensions that haven't been ported over that a lot of people use. I understand that. I'm just fortunate that the few extensions I use have fantastic Chrome ports.

There's been some talk of making Zotero stand-alone to deal with that kind of issue, but that's enough of a project I think it will be a while still. In the meantime, a Chrome port doesn't make much sense in some ways, as it'd wind up duplicating effort with a stand-alone port. In the short term, an unfortunate blow for data portability...

Chrome Sync does everything that Firefox Sync does

I really don't think it does. For one, it doesn't encrypt your data client-side so that Google won't know about it.

I use both and love both browsers but as a developer I still find it frustratingly hard to use chrome without having firebug or an exact clone of firebug. (I am hoping someone says there is a firebug equivalent for Chrome)

Firebug is aiming for full functionality on other browsers in the future. Sadly not ready yet :) http://blog.getfirebug.com/2010/10/24/firebug-metamorphosis/

That is exciting to hear, but it seems like it is ways away unfortunately. Thanks for the link.

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