Help Make Firefox On Mac Suck Less

bluephone writes "Colin Barrett, one of the new Mac geniuses, and an Adium developer, has posted an entry on his blog offering an open call to all Mac users of Firefox asking them, 'What sucks about Firefox on the Mac?' He says he already knows about and is trying to solve such things as: 'Native Form Widgets (currently scheduled for Firefox 3), Keychain Integration, Firefox should have a Unified toolbar (not completely hopeless, it turns out), Performance...', but he wants to hear what else Mac users want from Firefox. So please, if you're a user of Macs and the interwebs, then RTFA, unclog your tubes, and send him your ideas."

Well...

[Megane]

I can think of one tiny thing that sucks on Mozilla on Mac... when ever I copy a bunch of text from a window, it puts bleeping CR line breaks in instead of LF line breaks. Unless I fix it first, it makes text editing act a bit wonky.

Re:Camino

[zentex]

Isn't this what Camino is for? Like, the very reason for its existence?

yes, it is. When I first got my MAC, I didn't like Safari so I *tolerated* Firefox. After much complaining to a group of friends they suggested Camino, and I was instantly sold.

Sure, the releases are slow to hit market, but it's integration and functionality (not to mention it's clean look) out-weighs all else.

The old right click stuff

[zackster]

one thing I hate with FF OSX is the fact you can't right click on a bookmark in a folder on the personal tool bar and open it in a new tab it was marked in bugzilla as won't fix, and there's at least 6 duplicates, the bug is 300710 it used to work, "It was removed because right click in mac menus fires the menu item command"

Re:Here's a few

[ben there...]

Have maximize remove useless title bar.

Not really useless. It tells you what page you're on/article you're reading if the web dev is competent (ie not myspace devs).

F11 should do what you're looking for.

Re:one-button mouse world

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're using the trackpad on the macbook try putting two fingers on the trackpad as you click the button.

Re:Here's a few

[Paulrothrock]

If you want to cycle windows in an app, use Command+~. I'd really appreciate it if Windows behaved this way. Not every window is the same.

Not if you don't want it.

[fatalb7]

In the Keyboard & Mouse system pref there is an option called:
"Tap trackpad with two fingers for secondary click".
At least on my MB Pro.

Moving two fingers = scroll.
Taping two fingers = right click

I rarely use the trackpad button in fact.

to be fair to mozilla...

[owlnation]

They have significantly improved Firefox on the Mac as time goes on.

I found I had to be very dedicated to use Firefox 1.5 - that release just plain sucked, especially with regard to stability, favicon use, bookmarks, and I found the search bar crashed the app more often than not.

However, since v2.0 things have got better, it seems to be overall more stable and they have addressed the favicon issue up to a point. Bookmark control still leaves a lot to be desired. (Though that has room for improvement in the Windows version too - and I know that's being addressed for v3.0).

I seem to remember reading that for v2.0 they had a deliberate policy of a "Firefox look" across platforms, thus moved away from an OS X looking application. I'm not sure if that is the right decision. Firefox does look odd on a Mac. (And for the inevitable reply that says "but you can use a theme to make it look like OS X" - I'd rather not even try, themes can be very unstable and hog resources.)

It's a tough market - Safari is a great browser, the only real reason to use Firefox is the extensions (which is a great reason, and the one that keeps me loyal to the Fox. You'll only prise Flashblock and Adblock from my cold dead mouse hand)

Re:Looks like he's already got

[Anonymous Coward]

Primarily, fix the borken bookmarks. It'd be nice to be able to order them by hand rather than having the app decide for me which order they should be in.

Huh? Bookmarks--> Organize Bookmarks... now move them around by hand all you want.

Re:Camino

[FranklinDelanoBluth]

Camino still lacks very simple functionality and it does not support all the myriad plugins that Firefox does. Just a simple example, Ctrl+Click doesn't open in a new tab.

I like Firefox a lot on the Mac. In fact my only complaint is performance - (e.g. a total virtual memory footprint ~700MB on a machine with only 512MB physical RAM!!!!!!).

Re:respect icc profiles

[Anonymous Coward]

That is already being worked on and will probably make it into Firefox 3.

  https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16769 [mozilla.org]

Re:one-button mouse world

[wnknisely]

Goto "about:config"

Set ui.click_hold_context_menus to "true"

Enjoy!

popup menu problem with multiple screens

[cyfer2000]

I have two screen attached to my mac, and if I put a firefox window in the second screen and type things in address bar or search bar, the popup menu appears in the first screen. Safari doesn't have this problem.

Re:Camino

[fangorious]

ctrl+k puts the cursor in the search bar, ctrl+up/ctrl+down cycles between search engines

Re:Camino

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I just want FF to not crash so much in OS X. I'm multiplatform, keeping functionality and extensions is important. Camino seems to be most relevant if you never want to move your profile between platforms. I can do that in a few minutes, and have done that several times. The extension compatibility is important because there are very few good extensions for Mac-only browsers, the genetic "depth" of the available extensions is very shallow, I've come across too many circumstances where FF has a few alternates to try to do a task, the Mac-only stuff might only have one extension that does a task and it doesn't do it very well.

Re:Camino

[zeath]

I love the Ctrl+L shortcut that gives focus to the address bar.

I have yet to see a browser for which F6 does not provide the same functionality. Mozilla's Firefox Keyboard Shortcut [mozilla.org] page doesn't even mention it. Granted you won't find the 'gg' or 'wiki' pseudo-commands in, say, IE, but F6 still does its job. As for the search bar, I'm not sure if there is a shortcut to get into there directly, but I do know you can tab into it once you have the focus in the address bar. This assumes, probably, that you don't have any other input field between the address and search bars in the toolbar. The Firefox help page does mention that Ctrl+Up and Ctrl+Down will let you cycle through the search engines, too.

Re:Camino

[chanrobi]

I love how I can simply type "slashdot" then hit Ctrl+Shift+Enter to have it turned into "http://www.slashdot.org".

I love how I can simply type "slashdot" then hit Enter to have it turned into "http://www.slashdot.org" in opera.

UNO makes Firefox look a lot prettier on OS X

[spam38]

The way Firefox looked in OS X always kinda bugged me, and in my search for a more OSXish theme, I've found UNO. I'd try to explain what it is, but you'd be better off checking the website: http://gui.interacto.net/ [interacto.net]. There's also a Firefox theme that pretty much completes the package at http://www.takebacktheweb.org/ [takebacktheweb.org]. Its called "GrApple (UNO)".

Re:Sync Bookmarks

[Gadjet]

Google for 'Google browser sync firefox extension' this does exactly what you've described

I use it for 6 computers, all running different operation systems. I even have it syncing to my work computer. Its great.

Re:Well...

[Snover]

Macs haven't used CR as the line delimiter since OS 9. OS X uses LF, like every other BSD and *nix.

Re:Camino

[sconest]

I love how I can simply type "slashdot" then hit Ctrl+Shift+Enter to have it turned into "http://www.slashdot.org".

I love how I can simply type "slashdot" then hit Enter to have it turned into "http://www.slashdot.org" in opera.

I love how I can simply type "/." then hit Enter to have it turned into "http://www.slashdot.org" in opera. :)

Re:Camino

[Buran]

Check out ShapeShifter and Candybar. They change the theme and icon theme, respectively.

And they aren't illegal, like the GP suggested.

Re:Camino lacks foxmarks!

[Blakey Rat]

Speaking of integration with OS X...

Being able to sync with bookmarks stored on DotMac would be a nice feature that Firefox currently lacks but Safari has. That, and the Safari using the OS-standard spelling dictionary are the reason I prefer it right now.

Re:Camino

[ncc74656]

On Linux/BSD/etc., it hardly integrates with GNOME (similar to how it "integrates" with Windows, just using the graphical toolkit and UI guidelines doesn't count as integration), and when it comes to KDE, you might as well use Konqueror because Firefox is Peter Griffin in the Million Man March.

There is a way to get Firefox to use its own file dialogs [ubuntuforums.org] instead of the sucky GNOME dialogs. It's still not KDE, but at least it's more usable than GNOME.

(The necessary files may be in a slightly different location; they are on Gentoo, which is what I use. You can also use this fix with Thunderbird to the same effect.)

Re:Camino

[tjohns]

Camino can't support extensions because it doesn't use XUL for rendering its UI. If they used XUL, then they'd no longer feel like a native Mac app.

Take a look at all of the cross platform frameworks out there. Qt+, Java, etc. I have never seen an app written with any of those frameworks that feels native on OS X. Widgets are ever so slightly different and are sized differently. Sheets don't exist on other systems. Tabs often appear as tabs rather than as a row of buttons. Apple's human interface guidelines differ from what would be expected on Windows. The keychain doesn't exist on other platforms. I could go on.

Quite simply, there's no good way to write a cross platform app and make it feel native everywhere.

Oh, and for what it's worth, Camino supports plugins. It just doesn't support Firefox's plugins.

Re:Camino

[Fahrenheit 450]

Also, you can change the shell via NetInfo Manager and change your file manager by using something like PathFinder.