Flashes of Panic

Back in January, I switched my default browser again. I’ve gone back and forth between Camino and Safari in the past, and sometimes flirted with Firefox. I’ve been intrigued by the architecture-specific builds of Firefox, the so-called “G4-optimized” versions, so I finally tracked down and installed Deer Park. Then the semester started, and I never went to the trouble of wrapping up the experiment and switching back; I’ve been using Deer Park for months now.

Deer Park is so called because it’s not an official QA’d build distributed by the Mozilla Foundation; it’s an exercise of open-source rights, the product of a few determined people downloading the Firefox source code and building it. (Why? Because MoFo, preaching the message of simplicity and evangelism, has to produce a single Firefox binary which works on all Macs. But there are G3s, G4s, and G5s out there, as well as a growing number of Intel Core Duos, and it’s potentially possible to make a lighter and faster browser by compiling binaries specifically for each architecture.) There’s some identity issues as a result; for example, the browser identifies itself as “Firefox” in my menu bar, but as Deer Park in the dock.

Last time I played with Firefox, I was left with three problems which kept me from making it my full-time browser:

• No go-away button on the tabs. I like that in Safari and Camino.
• No keyboard shortcut for “go to home page.”
• Windows-like form widgets, not Mac OS Aqua widgets.

The Deer Park build I installed offered a choice of builds with Firefox widgets or Aqua widgets! I cheerfully grabbed the Aqua-widgets version and checked that item off the list. I’m not sure if it’s actually faster than the MoFo build (or, for that matter, Camino,) but it solves this problem, so it’s worth the custom build. Then, I found and installed the TabX extension and checked the “go-away button” problem off my list.

Keyboard commands remain an issue, and there’s a bug in Bugzilla for them. The problem, as I see it, is that on the Mac, splat-shift-H means “Home.” That’s the case in the Finder, Safari, Camino, and nearly any other application with the concept of a “home” state. In Firefox—and, importantly, on Firefox on Windows—that key combination opens the history. It turns out that many Firefox developers think it’s more important to be consistent between Mac and Windows within Firefox than to have Firefox be consistent with other Macintosh apps; I’m not sure I agree with the reasoning, but there it is. Another key combination that’s missing is one to allow users to cycle left or right through their tabs; in Safari, splat-[ and splat-] do this. This is still an annoyance to me, to have to go to the mouse or trackpad when I’m used to doing nearly everything with the keyboard. I’m slowly getting used to alt-Home as the “go to home page” key combination, but it’s even harder when I’m using the Powerbook keyboard (where “Home” is mapped to the left-arrow key) because I need to do fn-alt-left instead; I can’t train my fingers to both combinations.

I wound up discovering a few more annoyances along the way. For one thing, Safari allows you to designate a helper app for RSS URLs, and I liked being able to click the “RSS” or “ATOM” buttons and have them plopped right into NetNewsWire. Firefox, and consequently Deer Park, want to handle the feeds themselves. I haven’t figured out a way around that yet, so I’m back to click-copy-paste. I had a similar issue with del.icio.us integration; Cocoalicious would grab URLs directly from Safari, but not Deer Park. I worked around that in a way I hadn’t expected: I installed an extension which added that function to the contextual menu, so I can just right-click (ctrl-click) on a page and post; I don’t even need Cocoalicious anymore.

Which leads me to the last point, the one which may override all the other annoyances: Firefox extensions work just fine. Aside from the two I’ve already mentioned, I also put in the BugMeNot extension and ForecastFox, most notably. I skimmed Julie’s list for recommendations, and while they don’t always make up for the remaining annoyances, they’ll be hard to give up if I do go back to Safari.

Now Playing: The Time Being from Somewhere Else by The Church