Mac addicts and Firefox
There are a few smart people who can’t stand to use Firefox on Mac because they’re so hyper-aware of the OS X user interface.1 Although it doesn’t surprise me that John Gruber is one of those people, it does surprise me how close he seems to switching.
Other than background windows looking like foreground windows, all of his issues are either extreme power-user features (AppleScript support), things that are easily arguable (clicking on the URL bar selecting the URL), or things that Firefox could quickly steal from Safari and should make everyone happy (submenus with additional history items in the History menu.) Considering how small his concerns are, I think it says a lot for the Mac work people at Mozilla like Josh Aas have been doing to get so close to being used by someone so Apple-centric.
- As an 8-year Mac user who loves the OS X interface, but still prefers Firefox to Mac, I’ve always found this curious. I feel like I should be one of those people, but I adapt quickly to not having things like the Services menu. Shock, horror. [↩]
April 5, 2008
1:02 am
“Arguable” isn’t.
April 5, 2008
1:23 pm
I’m going to assume you mean that “arguable” isn’t a useful term. You’re probably right, along with “questionable”. I guess I could have said “subjective”.
April 5, 2008
3:44 pm
Webkit rocks my world. Apparently it rocks Epiphany’s as well.
April 5, 2008
5:48 pm
Webkit and Gecko are both feature-complete enough rendering engines that I think the UI layer is more the differentiating factor between them. I’d rather use Firefox backed on Webkit than Safari backed on Gecko.
April 8, 2008
10:25 pm
Some other UI things I’d miss:
The familiar spell check in text entry (with all the words I’ve added to AppleSpell).
I have a lot of text entry keyboard shortcuts that work in all native cocoa text entry boxes (like the built in emacsy ctrl-e etc. but I changed them to suit my keyboard layout.)
Conventions for tabbing between form elements and such consistent with the other system UI.
Rounded buttons.
I like the consistency of having cocoa text entry so much that I’ve switched from Word to a cocoa word processor.
Firefox has been tempting me lately, however, because I have a weird bug with Safari not uploading files. Also, I probably would not use Safari if it weren’t for Saft, which is not free, so I guess I’m not a pure Safari supporter.
April 9, 2008
1:11 am
The rounded, Mac-like buttons, and a lot of other Mac UI things, have been fixed in Firefox 3 (which is what John was reviewing.)
April 22, 2008
6:43 pm
No, actually, I was saying a lot of the things that are supposedly arguable aren’t. “Arguable” or “subjective” in UI design means “not thought out” or “not measured.”
Pingback tewha.net » Blog Archive » Arguable, subjective.
April 22, 2008
7:11 pm
[...] coworker posted on Firefox 3 and Mac addicts, and mentioned: Other than background windows looking like foreground windows, all of his issues [...]
April 23, 2008
4:47 pm
Actually, Firefox has introduced butt-ugly rounded buttons to the toolbar in their new theme. Those haven’t been fixed. So “fix the rounded buttons!” is ambiguous at the moment.