What I Hate About Firefox for Mac ~ Mac ~ Junecloud

What I Hate About Firefox for Mac

Posted September 11, 2005 in Mac.

Firefox is a pretty great browser, especially in the Windows world. Its support for extensions and themes make it the most customizable browser available, an area where I’d love to see others step up to the plate. But in the Mac world, Firefox has a lot of problems. A lot of new Mac users rush to download it, thinking that Safari just couldn’t possibly compare. I can understand this if you’re attached to your extensions, but in many other respects, Firefox for Mac just doesn’t hold up.

Keyboard shortcuts don’t even work half the time. If you’re viewing a QuickTime movie you often have to click outside the movie on the page somewhere before you can close the tab. And that’s just one example.
~~If you have too many tabs open, there’s no way to get to them with the mouse, or even see what they are, without going through them one by one using a hard-to-find keyboard shortcut.~~ (Fixed in 2.0 beta)
~~If you have too many tabs open, the close tab button can get obscured. It’s hard to tell if you’re going to click on another tab or close the current one.~~ (Fixed in 2.0 beta)
It has none of the download niceties like unpacking disk images automatically or installing widgets.
There’s no support for the system wide spell checker. Sure there’s an extension for spell checking, but having the same dictionary in every app is so much nicer. All of my custom additions are there, so I don’t have to tell each and every app that my own name is spelled correctly.
Likewise, the lack of command-control-D (which brings up a word definition in Cocoa Tiger apps) means many more trips to Google.
Again, I much prefer the system wide keychain to an app-specific one.
I much prefer Safari’s image preview when you drag an image to the desktop so you can be sure what you’re dragging. Firefox just gives you a rectangle with a grey outline. Images are often layered on top of each other, so there’s no telling what you’ve grabbed.
Firefox’s generic form elements look awful. On the opposite end it annoys me (much less so) that Safari ignores most form element styling, but the Safari team is set to one-up everyone in the next release… Even checkboxes and radio buttons can be easily replaced with images using CSS.
~~Windows Media is even worse in Firefox, and the excellent Flip4Mac QuickTime WMV plugin doesn’t work.~~ (Fixed in 2.0 beta)
Dragging a bookmark to the desktop uses the URL for the file name, rather than the page title. Ugh. Quite often it just uses the domain name, rather than the full URL, which is even worse.
Few of the typical Mac keyboard shortcuts for typing work as expected. Hitting up arrow or down arrow to go to the beginning or end in the address bar doesn’t work.
The interface is just clunky. The download box is a good example… If you clear it then all of the progress bars flash. And maximizing it gives you this huge window, rather than one that’s perfectly sized to show everything.

Fortunately, many of my complaints are being addressed in Firefox 1.5. Here are some complaints with 1.x that have already been addressed as of the Firefox 1.5 beta 1:

Say you open a bunch of pages in tabs. One or more of them doesn’t load. First of all, you get all these damn dialog boxes you have to dismiss. But even worse, the address bar doesn’t show the URL of the page! So if you want to try loading it again (duh) you have to go back to the original page and figure out which of the many links you opened is the one that didn’t load. This is a huge source of frustration, and it happens every time if I open too many tabs at once. Thankfully, Firefox 1.5 solves this by showing the error in the standard web page area, like most other browsers do. Even better, there’s a Try Again button to reload the page. It looks great too, even better than Safari!
Clicking once in the address bar selects the whole URL. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve clicked once and hit backspace, trying to fix a typo or whatever, only to delete the whole damn thing. Fortunately this problem is gone.
The beta does make some interface improvements, but there’s still plenty of work to do. I’m puzzled by the older style OS X tabs in the preferences… The newer style introduced in Panther are much nicer.

To be fair, there are a lot of things that Firefox does right, aside from the aforementioned customizability. You have more control over popup blocking. It (optionally) warns you when you close a window with multiple tabs. You can have large images resize to fit the page. And so on. If it continues to improve, it may very well surpass Safari… but then again, who knows what the next version of Safari will bring. I will say, it’s great to have a choice between two solid browsers, even if I do have a lot of gripes about one of them.