after reading encouragement from both jonathon delacour and shelley powers, i'm trying my best to like firefox. but i'm not having much luck. as i mentioned in comments to both those posts, my first problem was form elements. they were ugly enough to turn me away before i even used a form in firefox. but now as i'm trying to type into a textarea, my text is restricted to an area much smaller than the text area (for some unknown reason), yet the textarea doesn't force wrapping, so longer URLs create a horizontal scroll bar that makes me regularly lose my cursor while typing. ugh.
but that's just the beginning. in little time i've wandered to a page that for some reason displays as source rather than a web page. maybe the server is sending a bad mime type or something, but i don't see any way to change this. ugh. the search bar is nice, so i installed a bunch of engines, such as the one for php.net. php.net has this really nice feature that allows me to type in a URL like php.net/time and go directly to the page explaining the "time" function. i use this quite often. it's sort of like googles "i'm feeling lucky" feature. but because it doesn't put the search in the query string of the URL, it doesn't work with firefox's search engine format, so instead the php.net engine searches the site using google, and then i have to click on the result i want. ugh. maybe if i get through the other problems, i'll make a server-side application to convert a URL like randomchaos.com/php-net.php?q=time to php.net/time. the annoying thing is, i know the developers know how to make searches without using the query string, because the functionality is available in search keyword bookmarks, but that moves the search to the address bar (confusing) and forces me to type an identifier for the engine. that's scarcely simpler than typing the full URL php.net/time.
the only other problem i've had (in the less than an hour i've been using firefox) is the user interface for closing tabs. safari takes the (i think) rational approach of putting the tab close button on the tab to be closed. firefox for some reason has a single button off to the side to close the frontmost tab. this means i can't close tabs that aren't frontmost. but because the butotn is attached to the window rather than a tab, it also means (for now at least), i'm always unsure that clicking this button won't close the hole window, and i waste time worrying about this even when i'm closing the frontmost window. ugh.
i'll give it another day or so and see if the nicer features, like the web developer toolbar (which i just discovered disables text input whenever menus are open - ugh), overcome the problems.