The Buckblog

Since moving to the Mac in March of this year, I made a 7-month effort to fall in love with Safari. I almost succeeded, especially since the default look-and-feel of Firefox on the Mac is excrutiating. However, there was just enough pain involved in using Safari that I began to look at making Firefox my default browser again. In particular:

• Safari makes debugging Javascript very, very painful. Often, you’ll get an error message with a line number of 0. The only way to debug those are to throw alerts everywhere. That, or use Firefox (or Opera, which really seems to have figured out how to report JS errors, backtrace and all!).
• The tab key never seems to behave like I expect in Safari. I’ve tried the various options for changing its behavior, but it still surprises me. I haven’t really tried to sit down and define why it surprises me, but Firefox seems to behave more in keeping with my expectations.
• The tab key in dialogs in Safari never seems to work—I have to explicitly point-and-click when I want to click something other than the default button. Grrr!
• Safari doesn’t have Greasemonkey! I decided I wanted to see what all this hoodwinkiness is about, and it was too much of a pain to have both Firefox and Safari open at once.

So, I turned to Google to see if I could solve the look-and-feel issues I had with Firefox on the Mac. And, lo and behold! I found the following nuggets of wonder and beauty:

• GrApple is a very nice OSX-ish theme for Firefox. Makes it look much (much!) nicer. (Unfortunately, at the time of this writing the site appears to be having problems…hopefully that gets resolved soon.)
• Tab X is a Firefox extension that puts the “X” button (for closing tabs) on each tab.
• Firefoxy is a MacOS app that updates your Firefox chrome to make form widgets look a bit more like OS X widgets. (Just a bit—but it’s a lot better than the klunky Win32 look that Firefox sports otherwise.)

Furthermore, Firefox has a feature that lets you import your Safari bookmarks! Very nice. It even preserved the contents of my bookmarks toolbar, which I had set up just so in Safari and was a bit trepidatious about replacing.

These, taken together with the speed improvements in Firefox 1.5, make using Firefox on the Mac much nicer. I now use Firefox exclusively, and only dust Safari off every now and then for testing.