My Quick Visit To Firefox 22

I Want To Believe

With some of the great things being written about Firefox 22 (see Tom’s Hardware Benchmarking), I thought Firefox 22 might be worth a looksie, maybe even a switch-a-roo. I hope that some of the Firefox tinkerers might shed some light for me on any of the items below.

…. because, I want to believe again.

How much? Well I imported my Chrome bookmarks to FF22 which was a breeze with Firefox :

Bookmarks > Show All Bookmarks > that little star boxy icon thing > Import Data From Another Browser > select which data

While I was at it, I figured I might as well add DuckDuckGo as a search engine. With all of the recent privacy concerns, yes it would be good to support Mozilla and DuckDuckGo a bit more.

Click down arrow in Search box > Select Manage Search Engines > Get more search engines > locate DuckDuckGo Plus (2nd choice on featured list) > Add to Firefox

Ready to rock ‘n roll.

Where I need some tuning

Responsive Design View

Firefox has this nifty feature (introduced in Firefox 15), within Tools > Web Developer or the Web Inspector. I enjoy using a similar feature in Chrome to see how a site reacts within different screen sizes – particularly the mobile side.

Why are media queries not loading for the appropriate screen sizes?

I tried a couple of known sites that should be responsive and which use media queries to target mobile devices. Firefox, resized the sites with the Web Responsive View and there was some responsiveness due to the framework used on the site, but certain media queries were not loading. In Chrome though, the sites displayed fine in the Web Inspector and I confirmed the view on the actual mobile device. Firefox choked in this area and I’m not sure why.

This is kind of important to me. Is this a known bug or issue for others?

Awesome Bar

I do like Chrome’s Omnibox. One input area as an address bar and search bar. I really like this approach in fact.

Firefox has the awesome bar to do the same thing. However, there’s also the traditional search box next to it too.

Okay, I guess.

Why does the Firefox address / search bar (a.k.a. Awesome) use Google for web searches if I’ve selected DuckDuckGo in the Search box as my default search engine?

Ok, maybe there’s a behind the scenes config setting to change this, but why make users do this at all?

Update

In case you’re wondering about that configuration setting : Changing the Search Engine in Firefox’s Awesome Bar

… and the value for DuckDuckGo is :

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=
    

Top Sites

I like the ability to pin a bookmark to the new tab’s Top Sites area.

However, getting a bookmark to this area was not very intuitive.

Why does Firefox 22 delete my dragged bookmark from the Top Sites area even though it appears to have been successfully dragged there?

This happened quite a few times as I tried setting up the new tab top sites area.

Real Estate

The top area of Firefox takes up slightly more real estate than Chrome. This is due to the decision to keep tabs below the red/yellow/green window buttons of OS X. Chrome places the tabs on the same level as those buttons. This is a small detail but makes a real difference on smaller screens where every pixel matters.

Update

Perhaps Firefox 25 is going to fix this little problem. Firefox 25 image

I’d like to use Firefox 22

I do like many things about FF22. The web inspector has such a modern look and feel to it.

I’d like to give my web usage to Mozilla and DuckDuckGo. Chrome and Safari limit the search options but at least there are DDG extensions available. I might end up back with Chrome, but …

I really want to believe …. Firefox can be more useful to me.

I think I’d personally feel better too.

The Firefox community is one reason that I’d love to keep Firefox as my default browser and not make this just a quick visit.

Update

I’m still using Firefox 🙂