Firefox on Linux 19 years, 9 months ago by Martey Dodoo

When I decided to switch to Linux, I was only slightly concerned about finding suitable applications. For web browsing, I figured that I had it covered. Mozilla Firefox, simply the best browser on today's market, had the advantage of running on Linux as well as Windows (good ol' cross-platform compatibility strikes again).

My previous experiences with Linux nightlies of Firefox have been less than optimal (the last nightly I downloaded temporarily killed all Gecko-based browsers on my system; this was a slight problem as the only other graphical browsers installed were Mozilla and Epiphany, which both use Gecko), so I decided to emerge the latest stable build from portage. It worked reasonably well, although I soon noticed that middle-clicking on a page had the tendency to return three pages in the past (this is a problem when you are at 1600x1200 resolution, where text is quite small). Another minor annoyance can be seen on the right. While that "Go" menu may seem fine, it actually contains the first ten links in the browser's history, not the ten most recent.

However, as I have said, these problems are minor. Even better, these bugs have probably already been fixed in the nightly builds (some of which actually are stable on Linux, my negative experiences aside). If these bugs were in other, more popular web browsers that do not have nightly builds, I would have to wait years until it was fixed, instead of the minutes it will take to install or self-compile a new Firefox build.

UPDATE: The Go menu is still not working properly, even with last night's nightly build. I managed to find this bug on Bugzilla, but I have not created a clean profile, so I have not attempted to add my two cents yet (besides, that bug seems like the Go menu was simply not adding most pages, as opposed to only using the first pages in history). I am hoping it is profile-specific (although when I ran Firefox as root to initialize it after installing the nightly, the Go menu seemed to display the same behavior).