So I goto their site and click the link to get it from iTunes. This takes me to a browser page asking me if I have iTunes installed. For some reason it pops up the confirm box twice for me to click yes I have it.

iTunes pops up and takes me to the page for Dr Horrible. So I click the ‘Buy Season Pass’ button. This pops up a box asking for my account name and password. Now I have an iTunes account but I only ever used it way back in the day with those free pepsi songs. So I enter in my password and iTunes thinks for a second then realizes it will need my credit card details. Expected. So it pops up the account login box again before it takes me to the credit card page.

I enter in my credit card details and billing address info and click done and I’m taken to my account page. I’m sitting here wondering ‘am I done?’. Is it purchased? Is it downloading? A few clicks around iTunes and a trip to the ‘purchased’ section reveals that I have nothing downloading. It didn’t purchase anything.

So now I have to go start over. Which for some odd reason a trip to the my account loses your iTunes back button. I have to go back to the website and click the iTunes link again to get back to the page I was in in iTunes. Click the ‘Buy Season Pass’ button. And it asks for my password again. This box has no remember password feature.

This time I come out successful and a downloads section appears with 3 files downloading. Finally.

If this same user experience existed in online shops no one would ever use them. Seriously, can you imagine having to add something to your shopping cart. Login to proceed. Login to enter you billing info. Have to start over with adding it back to your cart. Login again to purchase.

So much for Apple usability.

update: To add to this, downloading through iTunes is painfully slow. Then when I went to watch them I popped them into the best media player around, vlc, and all I got was black. Turns out they are DRM protected m4v files. So the only option is to watch them in either iTunes or quicktime. Both of which chug barely able to play them. So after searching the web for something to strip the drm from the videos, like I did the few audio files I got from iTunes, and not finding anything usefull I turned to the amazing bittorrent and found a high quality rip to download. So now I have the unwatchable DRM laden ones I payed for and the watchable bittorrent ones.

That was how my Firefox Download Day went. I installed FF3, played with it for awhile, then reinstalled FF2. I was a little unimpressed. I wish I could like it, it’s got some really great features, but for now I think I’ll stick with 2. The couple things I don’t like are just too big for me to want to cope with.

The first and big one is the “AwesomeBar”. That thing is really not that awesome. Over the years of using the internet I’ve become very attached to the model of I type into the urlbar and it shows me url’s that start with those letters that are in my history. I don’t need my urlbar searching in my bookmarks. If I wanted to find something I had bookmarked I would go look for it in my bookmarks. I want my url bar to look in my url history.

Another thing is that when I click the dropdown arrow on the urlbar I expect to see a list of urls that I have typed into the bar. In firefox 2 you can open that dropdown and see the list of urls and arrow through them and hit the delete key on ones you don’t want in there. I would do that and basically keep a list of recently visted url’s that I could quickly jump to. Firefox 3 shows like the last few pages I have visited. That’s what the history menu up in the menu bar is for.

Also I miss the ‘go’ button on the urlbar.

The other big thing I was less than pleased with was the new behavior when you visit a site with a semi invalid ssl certificate. In firefox 2 it would popup a message telling you why the ssl cert was bad and ask if you wanted to continue to the site or leave. In FF3 it blocks you outright and you have to go through this mess of setting up the site as an ‘exception’. Call me lazy but I like to just hit the OK button to get to the site.

The reason this bugs me more than it probably should is that being a web developer I have development machines that have self signed certificates. Which is ok cause they are just used for testing https so they don’t need to be signed by a CA. Also my firewall uses https for the web interface to it. The ssl is completely valid and encrypts my traffic. Firefox 3 just doesn’t like it cause it’s not signed by a special CA. Yeah I could setup these 3-4 machines to just be exceptions but I come across sites that use self-signed certs on a fairly frequent basis and I just think it would get annoying to have to go through the steps you have to in FF3 just to get to them. Especially on the ones I only want to allow the ‘bad cert’ temporarily.

Lastly are my extensions. I had like 12 extensions that it said weren’t compatible with firefox 3. I’m sure in time these will get updated to work with it, but in the meantime being without them is like having pizza without the cheese.

There are a lot of new features in FF3 that I did like. Things like the new download manager. Being able to tag bookmarks. The new theme looks quite nice. Speed and memory improvements. The new way the remember password thing works. I really think if I could just get the urlbar to work the way it did before I would switch immediately. I’m sure in time I’ll switch and probably be forced to get used to the ‘AwesomeBar’, but until then I’m happy with FF2.

-Dexter-