Firefox Version 4 Problems

I just reloaded the main hard disk in my computer. I got hit by a nasty virus a few weeks ago, and while I managed to contain it enough that the computer was usable, it was still making things inconvenient.

This time I set up four partitions on the main disk:

1. is for the normal Windows installation
2.  is a copy of partition 1
3. is for my stuff
4. is space left over 
5. is a small partition that is reserved for something or other. It's not big enough to worry about.

The idea is that if I get hit by another virus and things go South again, I can simple copy partition 2 back over partition 1, and save myself a lot of grief, like having to install a bunch of applications.

Since this is my first time down this road, I had to install all my applications individually, and Firefox is one of them, and it is causing me some trouble. First off, they changed the right-click pop-up menu. Open Link in New Tab has changed places with Open Link in New Window. Opening a new tab has been my preference for years, so for most of the last couple of days I have been inadvertantly opening new windows. This is taking some getting used to.

They moved the Home button. Where is used to be on toolbar near the top left of the screen, it is now at the far right of the address bar. The forward and back buttons have also moved to the address bar, but that is not such a big deal to me. The benefit here is that the toolbar which was taking up a lot of space for only a few useful items is now gone.

The bookmark control that would bookmark all your open tabs and put them in one folder is gone. I only mention it because I tried to use it this morning. Since I hardly ever use it, this was kind of a freak occurence.

Today I wanted to open an old spreadsheet I had made using Open Office. I didn't install Open Office, it's too big, it takes too long to load, and I don't really need it. Google Docs works fine for what I do. Since I don't have a spreadsheet application on my computer  I uploaded it to Google Docs, and Google accepted the ODS format without a squawk.

Now I discover Cut & Paste doesn't work in the spreadsheet. The first time it works fine, but the second time you try it, it doesn't cut, and it pastes the previous item you cut. Well, that sucks. I tried it from the keyboard and using the spreadsheet menu commands, and neither one worked. I look it up on Google Help and they blame Firefox. Okay, lets complain to Firefox. 

The Firefox Help Menu has a Submit Feedback item that takes you to a neat page that reminds me of the three monkeys, but it works very well, at least the first time I used it to complain about the Cut & Paste problem. But I got nothing back from them, so I complained again.

I reported a problem, and all I got was some vague statement that it might be fixed someday, maybe. What I would like is an email with the current status of the problem now and another whenever you get around to fixing it. Interim reports are of no interest. And no, I don't want to root around in your bug tracking system.

This time it didn't work. After you use it once it is seems to have the same problem as Cut & Paste: it doesn't. Which is what got us here.

There is one other feature that I am not too sure about. When you open a web page, a little spinning green thingy shows up on the corresponding tab. After a bit it goes away. A while back I installed some anti-virus program that did the same thing to every link returned by a Google search. It was going out and pre-emptively scanning the page, looking for trouble. I got rid of it, it slowed things down too much, and it never found anything. That's basically why I don't run any anti-virus software: it's too much of a headache for the amount of good it does. On the other hand, I do get hit with junk once in a while, which is how we ended up here. We shall see how this goes.

P.S. I do run Windows Firewall, which seems to work fine.
P.P.S. I use Malwarebytes when I do run into a virus.
P.P.P.S. Blogger's new editor has some problems with cursor keys, which are really annoying, but so far not annoying enough to warrant a complete post all by itself.

Update February 2017 replaced missing image.