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February 10, 2005

Firefox
geekage, thing

Recently, as mentioned below, I've been trying out Firefox. After the first bout of surprise at how much better it'd gotten in the last 2 years, I got down to customizing it, fixing it up until it seemed almost perfect in appearance, or as close as I could conceive of. A few weeks of browsing later, and the pretty facing which was tied to "Firefox" in my mind had expanded into the third dimension, filled in with knowledge of the interface's workings and certainty that the web is, after all, contained within it.

So, what makes it better than Safari? First off, there's it's feature set, both by default and when expanded by extensions. The ability to search your history, to set your cache size to a large number and then use the Work Offline feature, which I had previously missed when I switched to Safari from iCab due to it's great use when someone else is using the 56k line, and to create a handy live bookmark of your del.icio.us links all make the browser quite useful.

On the topic of extensions, there are several which fill in the features which Safari has but which Firefox is lacking. SwittTabs is one of these, adding a (configurable) key command for tab switching, a feature which is quite useful, particularly when you bind the key command to your mouse, which I became addicted to in Safari. SmoothWheel also serves the purpose of filling in functionality present in Safari – the default mouse wheel scrolling in Firefox is extremely jerky, making large movements, and the default "smooth" mouse wheel scrolling isn't really very smooth. SmoothWheel, however, while not quite as smooth as Safari, makes mouse wheel scrolling quite usable. Finally, User Agent Switcher, like the user agent submenu of Safari's debug menu, allows you to sneak into those pesky websites which try to regulate browser entrance.

There are also some great extensions which add functionality not present in Safari and which I've become hooked to. ForecastFox adds the weather and forecast to the browser, and when it's placed in the lower right corner of the status bar, it's quite unobtrusive and yet easy to reach when you want it. I personally find WeatherPop and the like to be too obtrusive and yet not particularly easy to reach when you want to view them. Crash Recovery is another indispensable extension, providing instant restoring of your tabs upon Firefox's crash, and, optionally, when you quit and relaunch Firefox. No longer do you have to make constant bookmarks of your tabs for fear of loosing them! ChromEdit is also a useful extension, allowing you to easily modify your profile's .js and .css files without you having to find then and open them up in a text editor yourself.

clav.mozdev.org has some very nifty extensions as well. Stop/Reload, when combined with some additions to your userChrome.css should you use a nonstandard theme, gives you some additional room on your toolbar. Fusion gives you the yumlicious Safari-style progress bar, although it doesn't work quite as well as Apple's; occasionally it'll jump backwards. And, despite making one skeptical of the bloat of one's browser, Cards, which adds a whole bunch of solitaire games, is rather irresistible.

I've also recently become hooked on Translation Panel, which makes translations of words or phrases a snap with it's contextual menu item or side panel, and which can access 4 or so different translation services online, as well as Context Search, which works great whenever you need to look up anything on a webpage in depth.

Finally, Sage, LiveBookmarkThis, del.icio.us and Amazon.com Sidebar are all potentially useful, although I haven't gotten fully into them yet.

Perhaps the best thing about Firefox is it's constantly improving nature and it's generally great customizability. There are a small handful of things which I dislike about it, but thanks to the fact that it's being improved daily I don't have to worry too much about these things, as I know that afore too long it's likely they'll be fixed– or I can try to delve into it and fix them myself. With a mainstream commercial browser, it's more likely that my desires wouldn't even be near the todo list, and even if they were I'd likely have to wait a half a year before I could get the new features in the first place. And with it's customizability, one can also fix many bothersome things via .css files or extensions.

As far as appearance goes, Firefox has good and bad aspects, although it can certainly stand up to Safari. The themes here are excellent, particularly the "pro" ones, which feature Safari-style tabs. Personally, I find that changing the spacing to 0px for the toolbar icons makes it look much nicer, and makes the toolbar about the same size as Safari's to boot! In addition, while using the Grapple themes and ForecastFox, it's very nice to copy Grapple's pinstripe.png to your profile's chrome directory and add this line: .forecastfox-panel { background: #FFFFFF url("pinstripe.png") repeat !important; } to your userChrome.css, so that ForecastFox's background is pinstriped instead of the ugly white which it usually has. When using the Stop/Reload extension mentioned above, adding this code to your userChrome.css will make the button work with Grapple's small icons.

Also in the appearance department, Firefoxy and the widgets that it applies make it easy to switch from Firefox's oddish default icons to ones which, as others have said, don't look like fake OSX widgets but don't look ugly either. The main downside to Firefox's visuals as compared to Safari which I can find is the lack of antialiasing- some pages, thusly, look quite a good bit better in Safari than Firefox. There are also a few very minor annoyances, such as favicons tending to flash when you mouseover them.

On the down side, Firefox is missing a few of Safari's features, and some of it's components don't work as well as they might, or as they do in Safari. Most of these downsides are minor problems which make it seem a bit unmaclike – for instance, pressing the up or down arrows in a text field doesn't always move the cursor, and right clicking in the extensions window doesn't change the selection, but instead displays a menu for whatever extension is already selected. Another goodly portion of these problems have to do with general usability – tab switching is a tiny bit slower in Firefox than in Safari, just noticeable enough to be a small annoyance, and if the cursor gets into the URL bar you can't switch tabs via keys. In addition, the cache seems to reset itself when Firefox crashes (or when the power goes out...), as I discovered when trying to use the Work Offline feature.

Firefox is great; with the help of extensions, it has almost everything which Safari has, baring super speed, perfect Mac integration, and complete freedom from bugs and idiosyncrasies. In addition, it has a number of features which Safari lacks, and if you ever have need of something which isn't included, all you need to do is find or write an extension. And for a 1.0 release of an application which is in constant development, I think the flaws which it does have are quite acceptable. Although I have some remorse at having abandoned Apple's porch, Firefox has quite won me over to it's shores.

Posted by Trevor Savage at February 10, 2005 8:07 PM

Comments

Yes, Firefox does rock!

I have had no trouble with FF's cache clearing after a crash.

Here's what you could be doing wrong:
Got to Tool -> Options, then under Privacy goto Cache, and make sure its larger that 0k.

I use SessionSaver and offline restore workes fine, I have had some problem when it respects the No-Cache metadata or http header, it will keep trying to load for a while.

Another hand extension is ShowFailedURL, for when Text errors are enabled (a must!)it will show the url filed to access, instead of the chrome://error url

Cheers, Ryan

Posted by: Ryan at April 14, 2005 1:42 AM

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