It’s widely accepted in the Internet world that Firefox is the end-all, be-all of web browsers. Now that Microsoft’s long forsaken Internet Explorer is starting to show its age to more and more of the general internet using public, people are touting it as such in record numbers. Come with me; wont you, as I describe in detail the intricacies that make the best browser for Windows, one of the worst browsers for the Mac.
See [[http://www.design.thebigreason.com/blog/2005/12/01/firefox-the-best-worst-browser-ever/|full article]].
This is a good introduction to Firefox on Macintosh’s deficiencies, but it barely scratches the surface.
For instance, try hitting command-enter instead of enter after editing the URL on Mac Internet Explorer, OmniWeb, Camino and Safari. Now try on Firefox. Why would it do that? But it wasn’t accepted as a defect. The developers care more about cross-platform consistency than about platform consistency.
Mozilla Suite already showed that path leads only to irrelevance. Have they forgotten that lesson so easily?
December 3rd, 2005 at 5:46 am
I hadn’t noticed that one. Ouch! My intent with this article was primarily to address the features Mozilla highlights on their Firefox web page. I may have to write a sequel.
Thanks for the link!
December 4th, 2005 at 6:40 am
While I like Firefox in general, the stupidity of the cross-platform UI layer is still obvious. It’s taken them more than 8 years to get the damn thing stable (and marginally useful), mostly a function of the incredible complexity in making cross-platform UI stuff work at all. And then it’s not really native on any platform.
The amount of work in wrapping the gecko engine in a UI-specific layer seems small enough, based on time I spent in Linux/Win32 specific wrappers. What’s with the obsession over cross-platform UI?! Both Galeon and Epiphany (Gnome-wrapped Gecko variants) are great browsers, conforming to the platform they live on.
I fear cross-platform UIs is one of those utopias that every developer is doomed to believe in at some point in their thinking. Not that I know any companies suffering from the exact same problem.
December 4th, 2005 at 3:33 pm
I’m glad you recognize that. It’s been a concern on my mind for some time.
December 20th, 2005 at 7:06 am
Firefox developers chose the option key as the modifier. While, apparently, not intuitive to Mac users of other browsers, it still works.
It may have come out of a Jolt cola all nighter coding session where the programmers came to the concusion that “it’s an option to tab browse this URL, not a command to do so”.
If you want to complain about Mac Forefox, try Dilbert.com which works for every other Gecko browser I have: Camino, Netscape, and Safari ( at least I think Safari is Gecko based ).
December 20th, 2005 at 7:14 am
Sure, it works. But the point is that they’ve made behavior that works everywhere else not work in Firefox, and have justified it in the defect report with “that’s how it works on other platforms.”
As long as they insist on imposing one platform’s standards over that platform’s native standards, they’re going to have people who hate the result.
Firefox is a pretty good browser on Windows, but for Mac users who care about having applications behave in a Mac way, it’s just awful. And the developers will not fix it.
December 20th, 2005 at 7:14 am
Sorry, I was a bit ambiguous:
that’s how Firefox works on other platforms.