Firefox 3 Brings Ugliness to the Mac | Hacker News Reader

Firefox 3 Brings Ugliness to the Mac

sanneblad.se

22 pointsjacobbijani41 comments

There's really no reason to choose Firefox over Safari any more.

The only thing Firefox has on Safari is plugins, but the most useful of those, Firebug, is now essentially built into the new WebKit with it's excellent debugging tools.

The JavaScript performance is blazing too. Just check out the WebKit nightly: http://nightly.webkit.org/

+1 for Safari. Develop > Web Inspector is a very good Firebug replacement. I only ever open Firefox to a) test it in the browser or 2) to use more advanced Firebug features.

I tried to use WebKit debugging tools since I like Safari and Firebug is the only thing keeping me tied to Firefox.

Webkit Debug is ok for dom inspection, but it's horrendously bad for the on the fly CSS modifications that Firebug excels at. It's also missing the js eval console and several other crucial firebug features (+ yslow & firecookie). It's really a poor substitute at the moment.

For on the fly css editing, you can use cssedit2. It's alot better than firebug's css editing, although firebug still has a bunch of useful features (like showing the box model attributes of a DOM item). And CSSEdit2 use's safari as it's preview browser. I tend to use firebug way more than safari's debugging tools.

The main reason why i stick with firefox is dTa & AdBlock plus. Safari has some adblock extensions, but their awkward to install and just dont work as well as AdBlock plus. Linkification, tamper data (lets you edit your http requests), the bugmenot extension, PicLens and what not also rock too.

"It's also missing the js eval console"

It's there, click the "Show console" button on the bottom left (looks like a ">" with 3 horizontal lines to the right)

> looks like a ">" with 3 horizontal lines to the right

.. and to think that earlier in the Mac's history the mantra for GUI design was "a word is worth a thousand pictures" (see: http://www.asktog.com/columns/038MacUITrends.html). If Apple still followed that mantra railsjedi would have actually noticed that Web Inspector had all these awesome features.

You said it.. the plugins / add-ons.

Anyway, besides that, Firefox 3 doesn't seem to leak memory like a sieve like Safari.. the main reason I switched back to Firefox again.

If I use Safari for a few days, I can guarantee it'll be using 700MB->1GB of system memory and I'll need to quit and relaunch. Firefox 3 tends to hover around 200MB no matter how long I've been running it. That's a big deal, even with 4GB of memory.

How is greasemonkey (or its equivalent) on safari?

SIMBL plugin GreaseKit. Currently kind of sucks, but it's getting better.

http://8-p.info/greasekit/

What about find as you type? I really wish Safari had this.

Oh yeah, that's a truly excellent feature (which I think they stole from OmniWeb -- I seem to remember OmniWeb having a feature like that)

It's had that for a while, try command-F

No, that's a little different. I don't want to type command-F, I just want to start typing and have that search the page immediately.

If you can stand typing command-F you'll find that Safari has an excellent feature that very visually highlights the found text. It dims the irrelevant parts of the page and highlights the found text with a very hard to miss box. This is my favorite Safari feature.

I had used Firefox on my Macs for quite a while, mainly because Firefox had tabs while Safari did not. Even once Safari got tabs, I continued using Firefox, just out of habit.

Then one day, GMail refused to load in Firefox. I tried multiple times, and, while I never found out why this happened (a Firefox update? a GMail update? maybe someone here knows), I quickly ditched Firefox for Safari.

I use Google Gears for Google Docs and unfortunately it doesn't work with Safari, which is a shame so right now I need to use Firefox still.

Yeah that's unfortunate, but they are working on a WebKit version, which I'm eagerly awaiting.

Yahoo's BrowserPlus, on the other hand, supports Safari right out of the gate. Hmm...

Just had a look and found this post which seems that the webkit version is available? A little late here so I'll check this out in the morning: http://googlemac.blogspot.com/2007/05/google-gears-for-webki...

I use Firefox solely for the Delicious plugin. There's nothing for Safari like it unfortunately :(

What about blocking ads with AdBlock Plus?

PithHelmet

There's many other problems with FF3 on OS X then the basic GUI.

Because Mozilla chose to use XUL for as much as possible instead of taking it from Cocoa or Carbon. Nor do they share the same keyboard shortcuts (when typing, to move to the front/end of a line in Safari, then in Firefox for example).

By using Carbon, FF doesn't take any of the Accessibility features most other OS X applications have (like Voiceover). Not to mention the devs will have to rewrite these bits for 64bit support.

Grubar did a write up of FF3 vs Safari 3 awhile ago: http://daringfireball.net/2008/04/firefox_3_safari_3 - other then the Background/Foreground bit at the very beginning, it's still accurate. Though there's still Background/Foreground issues if you look closely (the tab bar when there are no tabs looks like a foreground window no matter where its located for instance).

Yeah, aside from all the interface flaws the number one reason I prefer Safari is the text rendering. Text in Safari looks phenomenal.

It is true, and I think it is short sited of the Mozilla devs, sure porting to use the standard toolkits would be a bitch, but basically they just re did all the work to copy the "Look" of the different kits. That doesn't scale well, instead of a project to make it native on a couple systems once that would take a lot of time NOW, they have a new system which will require getting upgraded with all the new OS version.

"Not to mention the devs will have to rewrite these bits for 64bit support."

Huh? Why? "64bit" doesn't change the APIs, at most it should take a recompile to build against the x86-64 version of the libraries. And thanks to Universal (fat Mach-O) binaries one single executable can contain ppc, x86, and x86-64 versions bundled right into it.

Apple isn't going to support 64bit Carbon.

I think the real question is: Why the hell would you need a 64-bit browser?

If the rest of my OS is going 64bit, why shouldn't my browser? Besides, I would imagine (unfortunately I'm not as well versed in this area as I would like) that there would be a performance gain from using a native 64bit browser on a 64bit OS instead of a 32bit browser on a 64bit OS.

True, some plugins for browser (I'm looking at you, Flash) aren't 64bit - yet - but that could be vendors dragging their feet because there's not enough of a demand. Or something else; I'm not privy to what goes on in the upper levels of Adobe. Or any other major company for that matter, but thats not the point of this post.

It gets really messy with plugins, Java, etc.

Browser developers have had to jump through all sorts of hoops to get 32-bit plugins (aargh, Flash!) working in 64-bit browsers, (e.g. on x86_64 Linux distros) but it's presumably even harder to do the opposite, use 64-bit plugins from a 32-bit browser. My x86_64 Linux distro has 64-bit Java, for example, which won't work with 32-bit browsers.

Aside from that, it won't be long until 64-bit operating systems take over even on the desktop, even in Microsoft-land, and the less 32-bit cruft that is dragged around, the better.

Regarding Carbon and Accessibility, VoiceOver, etc.:

Every standard view on Mac OS X receives accessibility and VoiceOver support, whether it comes from Carbon or Cocoa. So Carbon isn't the reason this breaks in Firefox.

The background/foreground issue is still accurate. The window changes almost imperceptibly from active to inactive.

Firefox 3 works on the Mac. It looks fine, and it's amazing there are people dedicated to whining about the minutiae of a few pixels here and there. Get on with your work people.

They're UI designers. That is their work.

i don't know about on Mac or Linux, but on Windows the Safari font rendering is unacceptably ugly. it's fuzzy and blurry. it's the single reason i'm using Firefox instead right now

i think Safari uses a custom font renderer, which on Windows is far worse than Windows' ClearType (which Firefox takes advantage of.) maybe Safari's rendering looks good on high res monitors, but on my 1280x1024 it looks like shit. it's almost as if it's doing three or four extra smoothing passes

here's a couple side-by-side screenshots (note, there is some bug that makes the background of single-line text fields black):

http://i277.photobucket.com/albums/kk63/temporaryupload/safa...

and yes, i messed around with the options. it doesn't matter what strength of font smoothing it's set to. it still looks fuzzy. in fact it looks worse on lower smoothing settings. maybe i'm missing something, and if so, i'm all ears. maybe i'm just experience a particular set of bugs :/

it's unfortunate because i like most of the rest of the package, especially the fast loading and JS.

I use Safari on Windows because I think it renders fonts better than Windows normally does. The blurriness isn't a bug, it's a feature, it's rendering the font correctly as it was intended to be seen. Apple font rendering scales correctly when resized without suddenly getting darker or lighter like Windows fonts, which often look either bolded or too thin when resized.

Apple and Microsoft have always disagreed on what's more important when rendering fonts, see http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html for an explanation. It's no mistake, Apple does this on purpose, I wish Windows rendered fonts as well as Safari.

It's really a matter of taste—i.e. whether you prefer typographic purity or optimization for screen. The Safari fonts look better to me even in your comparison screenshots.

possibly. though i think the difference is significant enough that many people (like myself) will not use Safari for that single reason. you might argue that just as many people will use it because of that reason. but if it's true that people go with what they are used to, then those fonts are going to look plain blurry to most Windows users, and not much is going to sway them

it would be nice if it had the option of using the standard Windows rendering. even without ClearType active it is distinctly better to me. i wonder how difficult that might be to arrange (i.e. is that part of the software open source?)

Site is too slow for me to even finish the article (images won't load). Maybe Johan should spend a little less UI critique time and a tad more on web server/site optimization.

I've noticed this before but it is described well here. General sloppyness all around in Firefox.

This is really, really nitpicking. I don't notice any of the things he listed.

http://www.sanneblad.se.nyud.net/johan/?p=180

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