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Browser wars
Things that Opera has that Firefox doesn't, and that keep me from switching to FF:
Good gesture support
Easily configurable toolbars
Tab configuration
The ability to use less than half a gig of memory to handle the dozens of tabs and multiple windows that I usually have open at once
Probably a couple other things that I can't think of off the top of my head
The ability to do all of these without hunting through thousands of extensions, fighting to install them, keeping them upgraded, and finding out that it's no longer supported or that a rival extension does what I want better
These are all subtle things, but major usability things for me. If any of you FF nuts can solve them for me, then it will go from my second-favorite browser to my favorite. Promise.
- Real paste-and-go at the cursor point in the address bar, not "go to whatever URL I have stored in my clipboard, regardless of the current contents of the address bar"
- A good session saver
- some modicum of a UI
- distinct session files that I can locate on my hard drive
- the ability to save and load multiple sessions, not just one at at a time
- some modicum of a UI
- Overloaded gesture commands (e.g. "down-right means 'close tab', unless there are no tabs open, in which case 'close window'")
- Gestures that don't cancel themselves if I wait too long before releasing the right mouse button
- Better movement recognition
- Tab focus that goes to the most recently used tab, rather than the next tab to the right, when I close the active tab
- A tab close box immediately below the primary close box, at the top right of my screen
These are all subtle things, but major usability things for me. If any of you FF nuts can solve them for me, then it will go from my second-favorite browser to my favorite. Promise.
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As for what should be in by default, that, of course, is a matter of opinion. I have never used gestures and don't consider it essential for ME, and of course anything that isn't essential for me should not be in the core. At least that's the way many people think. Everybody is going to want something, which means it's going to have to include everything to make everyone happy. But that's just not feasible, so the line must be drawn somewhere. And in all things geeky, the word of all words is "bloat."
And I think the term "FF plugin devs" is a bit misleading. Anyone can create an FF extension. That's why the quality can vary so dramatically. But at the same time, *anyone can create an FF extension.* Which means you can get FF to do ANYTHING you want it to, as long as you know how to code it or someone else interested in the same feature does. And if you find an extension that does almost everything you want but not quite, you can modify it to your liking. It's a blessing and a curse. As such, I choose to look at it from the positive end and be happy for my ability to choose. Others may choose to look at it from the other side. *points*
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Gestures? Fine. I guess there's an argument that that shouldn't be part of the default browser. (I happen to strenuously disagree, and think that gesture navigation should start becoming standard in lots of other programs. But intelligent people can disagree here. Fine.) But...good paste-and-go support? Session saving? Preferences that let you control the behavior of your tabs? Can you honestly say that adding these to the base browser would be bloat-like? That these things should really be relegated to additional features that must be searched for?
And yes, I know anyone can make a plugin. That's part of the problem. The primary Mozilla devs are better than the average quality put out by "anyone", even when you apply the bazaar model to this "anyone" and weed out the bad code. Sure, Greasemonkey wouldn't have come out of a corporate development environment, and the fact that it exists is a tribute to the power of community development and the skill of the Mozilla community. I don't doubt that. But such a dev community has never been able to patch basic fundamental holes in a user experience. That's why I can't recommend FF, or Linux, to an average computer user like my mom. (Well, with FF I make an exception, because of the security issues of IE. That's all.) They're still for power users, and I don't feel like I should have to act like a power user and hunt down the best extension site of the day just to rearrange my tabs.
My question is still out there, by the way. Do you know of the program that can do gestures the way I want? I don't. Do you know of a program that can do paste-and-go the way I want? I don't. And I've looked.
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The problem I have with giving people every single option under the sun is also business and confusion. I like not having to search through layers upon layers of menus to find the one option I want every single time I want to change it.
As for what you want, I didn't understand your description of what paste-and-go you wanted, but here are some possible extesnsions that might help.
Paste-and-go
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=65
Gestures
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=12
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=29
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=39
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=390
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