Wednesday, November 10. 2010
Firefox 4.0b7 - a few tweaks
The new beta of Firefox 4.0 was released today. I'm not quite willing to run Minefield (nightlies), so I've been eagerly awaiting this beta to fix some nagging but not show-stopper bugs in 4.0b6. One of those involved bad interactions of App Tabs with Panorama. Now the app tabs nicely decorate the side of each tab set in the panorama view.
Another nice thing is that the Option-Space key combination, which opened panorama in 4.0b6, no longer does so. That's OK - I found that to be too easy to press anyway. It's now bound to Command-E (right there at the top of the "View" menu).
Panorama has also been re-bound to swipe-up and swipe-down, which makes me less happy. In most apps on the Mac, those swipes are equivalent to the "Home" and "End" keystrokes -- they scroll to the top or bottom of the current page. So with a little help from my new co-workers, I discovered the settings to fix that.
The full list of gesture bindings is written up here, but the two I needed to change are browser.gesture.swipe.up and .down. The scrolling commands to bind to them are cmd_scrollTop and cmd_scrollBottom.
4.0 has a number of other great UI enhancements, too. I'm excited to see 4.0 finally released!
[edit: fixed formatting]
There's some smart formatting that's eating up the underscore in cmd_scrollTop (and for scrollBottom).
Option-Space was a poor choice (at least for people writing in French, it is the standard combination for unbreakable space, which we should use before colon, semi-colon, interrogation mark, …)
Swipe-up and Swipe-down is one of the reason I love my mac and firefox. Makes me very productive. That was one more bad design choice.
Thanks for the tip. Now, I just need to find how to get rid of Panorama which is the only bad thing in ff4.0
I'm not sure I'll be using panorama, either. I'm going to let it stew for a while and see if it ends up in my workflow, or just ignored.
Aside from occasionally hitting command-space, it stayed out of my way pretty well in beta6. It would be nice to have a configuration option to hide the icon and menu item, though.
