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Feedback on Mac Firefox Solicited
by , 3:45 PM EDT, April 23rd, 2007
The Firefox team would like to hear from Mac users about what they should do to improve the Mac OS X version, according to a post by Colin Barrett.
"As the Firefox release cycle marches onwards, there’s been a lot of talk about what sort of things are really affecting people day to day that we should fix, particularly on the Mac. If it’s anything, Mac users love to nitpick (guilty as charged).
"So, fellow Appleites, I put it to you: What sucks about Firefox on the Mac? Send mail to macfirefox at this domain, and let me know what you think," Mr. Barrett wrote.
Feeback has already been posted so that readers can see what other users have been thinking.
Observer Comments
MacSpeech's iListen is one of the only options for speech recognition/dictation on the Mac. While iListen works with nearly every other Mac program I've tried, it doesn't work with FireFox or Thunderbird. FireFox blames iListen - iListen blames FireFox, but the fact of the matter is it doesn't work and someone needs to budge on this issue!!
I like the interface, so please leave me the option of using it the way it is now.
It renders just fine on my PPC Mac and my Intel Mac, as long as I use optimized (Bon Echo) versions, but it could definitely be faster in general.
Upload support for sftp would be nice so I can use it with secure sites.
A page zoom feature would be great of those of us with crummy vision.
Ability to use the keychain, while still keeping a separate password manager.
QuoteGuest wrote:
Self explanatory.
Make it a Cocoa based app that uses services and all the other nice built-in things in OSX. Go look at OmniWeb, it's got the best user interface of any browser I've ever used.
I agree. The popup menus, radio buttons, checkboxes, and other features are direct copies of Windows. They have that flat, incomplete look that IE and Firefox have on Windows. (Vista and IE 7 might be different.)
If you want to use a REAL Mac browser--not just a ported Windows application, besides OmniWeb (which is not free), one that's quite fast, try Camino. It still has some problems, mostly with embedded QuickTime movies, but another version (1.1) is in testing that might fix this. It also uses the Mozilla engine, like Firefox. Camino doesn't have the wide range of extensions/plug-ins that Firefox does, but, so far, I haven't found that to be an issue. It doesn't do RSS, for example, but I use NetNewsWire for that.
If you want extreme flexibility, with lots and lots of options and preferences AND one of the few truly compliant browsers for the Mac, try iCab.
Besides Safari,the only two browsers I like are Camino and Omniweb. I would use Omniweb as my default browser, but compared to Safari it has poor PDF support.To be fair, that is not Omniweb's fault as Adobe's PDF plugin was designed to only work with Safari. Still I view a lot of PDFs online, and I like to view them in the browser, and Adobe makes the best plugin.
Camino is nice because it is speedy, and has the nice OSX feel that Firefox lacks. However, it lacks all of the nice plugins that Firefox has.
The problem with iCab, although innovative a one time, is it is the least web standard complaint browser out there. This shows because it has tons of problems rendering sites (in my experience).
Quotegslusher wrote:QuoteGuest wrote:
Self explanatory.
Make it a Cocoa based app that uses services and all the other nice built-in things in OSX. Go look at OmniWeb, it's got the best user interface of any browser I've ever used.
I agree. The popup menus, radio buttons, checkboxes, and other features are direct copies of Windows. They have that flat, incomplete look that IE and Firefox have on Windows. (Vista and IE 7 might be different.)
If you want to use a REAL Mac browser--not just a ported Windows application, besides OmniWeb (which is not free), one that's quite fast, try Camino. It still has some problems, mostly with embedded QuickTime movies, but another version (1.1) is in testing that might fix this. It also uses the Mozilla engine, like Firefox. Camino doesn't have the wide range of extensions/plug-ins that Firefox does, but, so far, I haven't found that to be an issue. It doesn't do RSS, for example, but I use NetNewsWire for that.
If you want extreme flexibility, with lots and lots of options and preferences AND one of the few truly compliant browsers for the Mac, try iCab.
I was using Safari, which is the worst browser for crashing. Firefox is not far behind Safari. Slow and crashes. Tried Shiiva and that crashes more than those two. Now I'm using Camino which is the best of all these browsers. And it's fast. I like options in Camino like instant bookmarks you can view from other browsers, no need to import. Better options to tweak also. Firefox and Safari for mac are similar in my opinion. Both suck.
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