Firefox 2

If I had to pick only one application to have installed on my pc, it would be Firefox. I live in it for a good chunk of the day, and am extremely hesitant to install anything else (with the exception of development servers and some programming tools). That’s the power of the web, you can do almost anything in a browser now days.

So, it was with great excitement that I updated to the new Firefox release a couple weeks ago. There are definitely some great features, first and foremost is the spell-checker (getting close to saying goodbye to Word forever) and second , improved tabbing. But there was one subtle change that is a rather large blow to pop-up windows. I don’t mean pop-ups in the bad way, when used for ads. I mean when purposely used for an application, such as the one I’m currently developing where the pop-up allows the user to monitor information while still using the main application. IMO, it would be very awkward to use a div-window within the main document. So, the change?

Note the “Raise or lower windows” option in the javascript settings. You can no longer bring focus to a opened window by default. The user has to grant this permission. Fat chance of relying on a user setting. So, my workaround is to close and open the window again when trying to bring it to focus. This is doable, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out how to save off the coordinates of the opened window before closing it. Still some more research for that one to get a nice cross-browser solution.

Anyway, couple the focus issues with the title bar issue discovered by a co-worker, and it really seems that FF is pushing hard against pop-ups.