Lately Safari has been annoying me in several small ways, Mac Firefox has gotten over most of its early performance and non-Macness problems, and development of Camino, my previous favorite, seems stalled out (its reason for being is rapidly disappearing as Firefox gets better than it is likely to become). I've been using Firefox for various tasks now and I'm thinking of switching over sometime soon for general Mac use.
There are still three things about it that bother me:
1. It seems unable to import Safari bookmarks, unless I'm missing something. Few new users on Macs are likely to be switching from Internet Explorer by now. 2. No Close Tab widgets. 3. No Mac Services integration (including the spell checker for forms editing). I do remember hearing during Camino development that it's really hard to integrate the spell-checker service into Gecko forms, but I suppose that a non-Apple spell checker extension would be just as good (does such a thing exist?)
#1 and #3 are Mac-specific porting issues; I suppose #2 is a matter of taste.
Also, the toolbar doesn't have an option for font-size icons. That's not so bad since I usually use the keyboard for that anyway, and the menu is nice, especially the existence of a "Normal" option; font setting control is generally better than in Safari, one of the things that is attracting me. But it's still nice to have the icons.
Again, that's more of a taste thing, esp. since the key combo is the same in both. The thing that REALLY aggravates me is that "The Three" all have radically different key combos for switching from one tab to another, and again, Safari is better since it documents this by explicitly listing the key combo and command name in the menu bar (Window->Select Next/Prev Tab, aka Shift-Cmd-Arrow). Whereas Firefox documents this only in an obscure part of the stand-alone documentation, and not in the menu itself, and the key combo. itself makes no sense (Ctrl-Page-Up or Ctrl-Page-Down). Camino, like Safari, documents this in the Menu bar explicitly, but again uses a third, different set of key combos (Window->Prev/Next Tab, aka Ctrl-Cmd-Arrow).
I bloody well want CONSISTENCY here, people. How damn hard is that?
I figured out how to do the import in a couple of steps, using a third-party free app that converted my Safari bookmarks to importable HTML. But the first couple of times I clicked on "Import" in the Firefox bookmark manager, it didn't do anything and I figured it was broken. Later it spontaneously started working. Go figure.
Having to use a third-party App. is pretty weak -- that'll deter most casual users.
Another bookmark issue deters even more users, the "Profile" glitch that forces the user to keep creating more new profiles with every login and/or browser launch, due to the profiles folder being stuck in a "lock" state and/or being corrupted. This was very common in earlier versions of Netscape, and is still quite common when one uses both Netscape and Firefox on the same computer, or even if not, esp. in Win XP and some Linux flavors (not so much in OS X). Several people on my friends list have complained about this, because when they lose the old profile, they lose their bookmarks, and their bookmarks are their lives.
Sorry, I was being a little obscure. Seamonkey was the project name of the original web browser part of Mozilla. That is, it's the browser usually known as "Mozilla", though people sometimes refer to it as Seamonkey just to distinguish it from Mozilla as the name of the whole project (or Mozilla as the old nickname for Netscape, I suppose).
I didn't even notice that that was there. (Which I suppose is a UI design problem in itself.) Having seen it, it's not at all obvious that it closes the front tab.
There are still lots of little UI infelicities in Firefox's dialogs; the bookmark manager feels more awkward to manipulate than Safari's, in ways that would probably take lengthy studies for me to articulate precisely. But the basic browsing experience is pretty good.
In some ways purity comes into conflict with ease of use. I personally prefer Firefox's slightly more complicated font settings to Safari's, but that is mostly because I am an old CSS geek and recognize that Firefox's settings map directly to the concept of CSS generic font families, so it's obvious to me how they are supposed to work. Any normal person would probably be baffled by the existence of separate serif and sans-serif font settings.
As a fellow CSS geek, I know what you mean. In fact it seems like the only way to arrange them, and the older ways seem completely wrong and unhelpful.
...Also, that arrangement for the close-tab widget means that you can't use it to close background tabs, something that I end up doing a lot for some reason.
Yes -- many situations incur this behavior. For example, sometimes I realize I accidentally have the same document open in two or three tabs, so I close the other two while I'm reading the front one. In this situation, with an average of eight tabs open, it's nice to reduce the clutter a little bit.
Other times, one of the backgrounds tabs will have been spinning for a while, unable to load a page, and I don't want the annoying show-stopping 'url can't be loaded' pop-up to appear, so I close that background tab right before it happens.
That's their Windoze bias rearing its ugly head again. Apparently that positioning of a tab-closure is common under various Win OSes. Whereas Safari and Camino do it in a more "Mac-like" (intuitive) way.
Agreed. Firefox has two or three more options on right-click than Safari does, like 'Send Link', 'Send Image', 'Properties', etc. But more crucially, it divides the contextual options into groups (separated by horizontal lines) for easy visual identification, whereas Safari pretty much doesn't.
It's possible that Safari de-emphasizes contextual menus because, being an Apple product, its developers are adhering to the ideology of the one-button mouse, with which contextual menus are marginally more difficult to invoke. But there are relatively elaborate ones even in the Finder, so that explanation doesn't make a lot of sense.
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There are still three things about it that bother me:
1. It seems unable to import Safari bookmarks, unless I'm missing something. Few new users on Macs are likely to be switching from Internet Explorer by now.
2. No Close Tab widgets.
3. No Mac Services integration (including the spell checker for forms editing). I do remember hearing during Camino development that it's really hard to integrate the spell-checker service into Gecko forms, but I suppose that a non-Apple spell checker extension would be just as good (does such a thing exist?)
#1 and #3 are Mac-specific porting issues; I suppose #2 is a matter of taste.
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I bloody well want CONSISTENCY here, people. How damn hard is that?
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Another bookmark issue deters even more users, the "Profile" glitch that forces the user to keep creating more new profiles with every login and/or browser launch, due to the profiles folder being stuck in a "lock" state and/or being corrupted. This was very common in earlier versions of Netscape, and is still quite common when one uses both Netscape and Firefox on the same computer, or even if not, esp. in Win XP and some Linux flavors (not so much in OS X). Several people on my friends list have complained about this, because when they lose the old profile, they lose their bookmarks, and their bookmarks are their lives.
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Thanks for pointing it out.
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In some ways purity comes into conflict with ease of use. I personally prefer Firefox's slightly more complicated font settings to Safari's, but that is mostly because I am an old CSS geek and recognize that Firefox's settings map directly to the concept of CSS generic font families, so it's obvious to me how they are supposed to work. Any normal person would probably be baffled by the existence of separate serif and sans-serif font settings.
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Other times, one of the backgrounds tabs will have been spinning for a while, unable to load a page, and I don't want the annoying show-stopping 'url can't be loaded' pop-up to appear, so I close that background tab right before it happens.
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MUHAHAAHAHAHAH -bounces off-
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