There's two things that have really been annoying me about Firefox lately.
First, sometimes, when Firefox pops up a "modal" dialog (e.g. a confirmation dialog that's supposed to remain on top and disallow you from interacting with the application), if Firefox isn't the current application (i.e., is behind another window, e.g. Word), the dialog shows, but can't actually be found. When you switch back to Firefox, it's, of course, waiting for some input to that dialog. So you can see your Firefox window, but you can't actually interact with it. You can't even click the Close Window ("X") button. So the only way to close it is to kill it! I'll hazard a guess and say the modal window exists *somewhere* -- perhaps, hidden in Firefox itself behind the main window. There's no consistent pattern...
The other thing that's really been shitting me is in recent versions (this bug didn't seem to be present in the 1.0 series -- only 1.5+), is your browsing history sometimes just mysteriously disappears. The entire history -- in the History sidebar, in the address bar dropdown -- all gone. As above, there doesn't seem to be any explaination for this, and there's no consistent pattern.
Now I'll get the Open Source retards hounding me telling me to log a bug. No freaking way. Every time I log a bug, I get flamed. Usually because the bug is "unreproducable". For examples, look at the PPP bugs in Debian.
Comments
The first problem is probably more a problem with Windows then with Firefox. On a mac you would just use Expose (F10) to show all the windows for that application. You would then click on the dialog box and get rid of it
And if it was a truly modal box then on a mac it would be attached to the window (literally attached, as in it will be moved when you move the window and it is impossible for it to disappear) and you would have no problems finding it.
The problem isn't Windows related. Windows deals in a similar way to modal dialogs to Mac. If you tell Windows a form is modal, it will deal with the details (making it show on top, etc etc).
An alarming number of Open Source applications (e.g. Firefox) try to create their own "modal" implementation. They're probably all using a similar codebase (e.g. GTK). The problem with this is that they probably snub the Windows API, and clearly, have their own buggy implementation.
I've never had this problem in applications I've created myself (e.g., in Visual Basic), where you spawn a form and simply tell Windows it's modal.
Well your not the only one - it happens (the 1st problem) occassionally to me as well and i'm running a pretty vanilla set up. From what I can see its not too consistent either - sometimes it works just fine, other times it just hates me....