Betalogue

This is another example of how Firefox for Mac OS X fails as a Mac application and feels like it suffers from an unacceptable lack of polish.

I often copy a web address (URL) to the clipboard and then want to open a new window in my browser, paste the URL, and instruct the browser to go to the page.

Because I am a fast typist and like to avoid unnecessary strain on my wrist with mouse movements, I tend to do all this with the keyboard, using keyboard shortcuts.

This means in particular that, once I am in the web browser, I do the following three things in quick succession:

1. press command-N to open a new browser window
2. press command-V to paste the URL from the clipboard
3. press Return to start loading the web page

When I do this in Safari, no matter how fast I go, the browser has no problem responding to my actions and doing what I expect it to do.

When I do this in Firefox, on the other hand, if I do not pause between step 1 and step 2, Firefox simply ignores the second shortcut (command-V) and does not paste the URL.

In other words, it looks like Firefox does not have some kind of “keyboard buffer” that would keep track of my keystrokes even when I type too fast for it to be able to follow me in real time.

It might be a small thing, but when you encounter the problem several times a day, every day, it quickly becomes very annoying.

I have already written about other shortcomings of the Firefox application for Mac OS X. It does not make it a bad browser. But it makes for a less then satisfactory user experience and is one of the reasons why I tend to stick with Safari as my browser of choice.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Friday, June 25th, 2010 at 9:39 am and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.