Jason’s Pointless Blog

I’ve decided to switch to FireFox 3 Beta for a week. I have been a solid Safari user and supporter since it came out, but the latest versions have all been horrible. Terrible even. Always beachballing and freezing up causing slowdown and making the OS run sluggish.

In the half hour I’ve used FireFox I’ve noticed quite an improvement over Safari. So I will use it for a week. After that time I will decide whether or not to keep it or go back to Safari.

Some pros:
It looks nice. Very Safari-ish. Clean and streamlined. After setting the icons to small and getting rid of the huge oversized back button it looks almost liike Safari from the future.

It’s fast. To me it feels much better than Safari. No beachballs. No slowdown. Nothing but browsing bliss.

It brought in all my Safari bookmarks. I don’t have too many, a few sites here and there all neatly organized. First thing I did when I opened Firefox was DELETE ALL THE STOCK BOOKMARKS, all of them, and import Safari’s back in again. Clean, fresh, none of that shitty “New PC, here’s a bunch of crap software we install by default because the companies paid us to do it but you can remove it if you fell like a few hours of deleting software you never wanted in the first place” feel anymore. I’m a Mac user. I like it simple. So long default bookmarks! Sayonara!

Some cons: (Maybe they can be remedied)
I miss my vast history. I had every page I visited for the last year in my history. I could open OS X’s Help menu and search my history to find anything I was previously looking at. Obviously I can still do that with Firefox, but it only imported my bookmarks, not my history. But such is life.

It’s not WebKit. Call me crazy, but I get off on how something looks. I can tell if an icon is a pixel wrong or if a page looks a pixel off between browsers, I was used to Safari’s CSS3 effects and shadows and such. Also, I was used to Safari’s lack of “focus rings” (i.e. those dotted lines that form around links when clicked.) and to now have them back and burning my eyes is just a small complaint. If something looks wrong, I will make it look right or damned if I put up with it.

I miss Inquisitor. More often than not, I will type something in Safari’s “Search” box and hit Shift+Return (My key combo for searching Wikipedia instead of Google.) to open it in Wikipedia. This allowed me to search normally, or search Wikipedia on a whim without having to change an option. Now, Firefox does allow me to switch between searching each site, but that actually means I have to manually change it. I’m a lazy son of a bitch. I want my shortcuts dammit!

In a week I expect to write up whether or not I will stay.