Call Me Al

As 1.5 gets closer and closer to being final, I would like to pause a moment to reflect on the default install.

Usually I carry the important pieces of my profile forward to each install. I was using 1.6a1 on all of my computers and decided that I was tired of dealing with the nightly update cycle. You see, you can't jump ahead in the nightly cycle. Instead you have to download the updates for every single day. I'm now CC'd on the bug for that. This is inconvenient when you're maintaining three computers. I think the real tipping point was when one update just didn't want to apply. The partial failed, so it tried getting the big package. That didn't work either. That's what I get for living on the edge.

The download and install on my office computer and my main PC at home was flawless. I had no trouble getting my cookies, passwords, form history, and bookmarks into 1.5RC1. My laptop was another story. Firefox would start up and then just die. Eventually I completely scrubbed Deer Park Alpha 1 from my laptop. I also removed my profile. Unfortunately I had forgotten to back up that profile. So I set off on an adventure with the first 1.5 release candidate. Instead of downloading all of my extensions and pulling my profile data from my other computer, I'm using the default install.

In the past 20 days I've felt the need to make very few changes. I have added only one bookmark to my toolbar and one to my bookmarks folder. That should give you an idea of how much I actually use my laptop. After the first week, I broke down and fiddled with the tabbed-browsing settings. I prefer to always see the tab bar and to have windows launch as tabs. I find it very confusing to have multiple browser windows, each with its own set of tabs. So I changed the values for browser.link.open_newwindow and browser.tabs.autoHide to reflect that. Actually, I used the options panel to make those changes.

Despite all the talk of privacy, I never bothered to alter my cookie settings. This allows all cookies until they naturally expire. Although this bothers me, I haven't decided if I really want to change it. My other computers are much more restrictive, but I use them constantly.

I still find the redesigned options dialog confusing. Privacy, Tabs, and Downloads are clear enough. But General, Content, and Advanced don't really tell me what they do.

But I haven't changed any other settings yet.