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."

Bring back...

[eggman9713]

...third-party cookie blocking please! This option was removed in FireFox 2.0 for whatever reason, and although this is not unique to the mac version, it would be nice to have it back, as it majorly prevents advertising cookies and gives me just that much more peace of mind when I surf the net.

Looks like he's already got

[wiredog]

all the suggestions I would make. 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.

Other than that, I prefer FireFox to the built-in Mac browser.

Its kinda funny.

[jellomizer]

I usually use Safari but I don't know why. I have firefox in my dock right next to it. I also tend to get slightly better compatibility with Fire Fox. But... I still use Safari. I think the main reason is probably the bookmarks work better in safari. But I don't really use bookmarks that much. I guess the only feature that I really prefer over Safari that I use over Firefox is RSS I just like Safari RSS Support better then Firefox. If I bookmark an RSS Feed it automatically subscribes me. And there is a search bar right there for me to find info in it. It is not that firefox is bad and there isn't a work around it is not that hard to do a cmd-F (though having the search on the bottom of the window is annoying) It is usually easy to make an app that looks and works good for both Linux and Windows. But for Mac there is a slightly different set of standards. Firefox isn't horrible but if still feels out of place.

Re:Camino

[mike2R]

Yeah, I use Camino on the Mac because Firefox is just too clunky, but I do miss the extensions - and have to keep Firefox for occasional use of those extensions I can't live without (Webdeveloper toolbar principly).

Huh?

[wandazulu]

I use FF exclusively on both the Mac and Windows, and I think the Mac version works *better* than on Windows...the Mac version doesn't get sluggish after opening and closing a lot of tabs, doesn't gobble up half a gig of ram, and I have never had it just up and quit on me like it does on Windows.

I find FF on the Mac is also more tolerant of some of the more ... baroque addons; I admit to being an addon junkie and addons that claim to be fully cross-platform crash on Windows while I've never had an addon crash FF on the Mac.

So, hey, if they want to make FF better, that's awesome, but to me, it's enhancement, not fixing.

Re:Nice idea...

[Anonymous Coward]

Correo?

http://www.nkreeger.com/correo/ [nkreeger.com]

That's Gecko + some Thunderbird code - the XUL shit + Mac interface

Re:Camino

[Anonymous Sniper]

Camino sucks because it doesn't do firefox extensions, and CMD+[1-9] doesn't switch tabs.

There are probably others, but the lack of extensions had me running back to firefox within 10 minutes of trying Camino. Oh, and because I use Firefox on other platforms and I'd rather it acted similarly on all of them.

Firefox however sucks due to the lack of keychain integration, and because it doesn't read the system proxy settings. Form widgets doens't bother me at all - in fact, I prefer the current setup.

Cheers.

-t

Re:Camino

[anagama]

Many people who work on it are the same people who also work on Firefox.

Perhaps then they can work on what drove me away from Camino -- the way it stores login data. If one site has two different logins (eg, gallery and blog), Camino barfs and remembers only one. Firefox can remember both. Or at least this was true some months ago when I finally got fed up with Camino, trashed it, and went back to Firefox.

Re:Here's a few [Command+~]

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you! I've been wanting to cycle between windows within an application for years, but it's never risen to the level of "must figure out how to do now". You've changed my life.

Re:Camino

[vertinox]

Ok... have you ever actually ran into a browser that you DON'T know how to use? Aren't they basically all the same?

Take Ad block plug for Firefox. It works on OS X, Windows, and Linux.

Off the top of my head I don't know how you would acheive the same thing in IE, Safari, or Camino.

I'm sure it could be done, but I don't want to have to spend anymore time than I have to when I'm working cross platform. If I learn it once on Firefox on any OS then I know exactly where to find the menu on another.

Native form widgets

[Trevin]

Funny, this was one of my big complaints about Mozilla on Linux several years ago. At the time I was overruled by the developers who proclaimed XBL widgets were the right way to go. I agree that CSS styles should be allowed to override the default widget look, but I still think the default look should be taken from the native OS, not MS Windows 3.1. Even at that, some of the widgets -- or at least parts of them -- still can't be fully styled by CSS in Firefox.

Network Settings

[donutello]

Firefox completely ignores all system network and proxy settings. Instead, you have to go in and configure your own for Firefox. The most annoying part of this is that Firefox's settings do not have the option to ignore simple hostnames. This makes it virtually useless for browsing intranet sites since you have to manually add each intranet site you want to visit to the exceptions list.

Re:popup menu problem with multiple screens

[chord.wav]

I have the same setup and problem. I solved it by restarting FF.
In my experience, it only happens if you started Firefox before attaching the second monitor.
When you attach the second monitor prior to starting FF, it doesn't happen.

Re:Here's a few

[MalleusEBHC]

Have maximize remove useless title bar.
Make alt-tab cycle distinct windows.
Recognize ctrl-based shortcuts.
Have a close button on the preferences window.

Otherwise it's the best software available for the Mac, after Boot Camp.

This pretty much sums up the problem with Firefox on the Mac. You have too many people who use it on Linux and Windows who want it to behave exactly as it does on those platforms. On the other hand, you have a lot of Mac users who don't like it because it doesn't behave and feel like a Mac app. Any Mac user will tell you that command-tab should cycle you through apps, and command-~ should cycle you through windows in an app, but then you have Windows users who aren't used to this functionality.

From the comments in this story, it seems like the biggest selling point of Firefox is the plugins. It would probably be a better effort to make Firefox plugins work with Camino (an already excellent Mac browser) than to try and Mac-ify Firefox.

Re:Camino

[Anonymous Coward]

In Windows I can choose my shell, file manager, icon set, window theme, etc. None of these can be done on the Mac without cracking into the deepest part of the OS with illegal tools.