

Firefox 3 Brings Ugliness to the Mac - jacobbijani
http://www.sanneblad.se/johan/?p=180

======
tlrobinson
There's really no reason to choose Firefox over Safari any more.

The _only_ thing Firefox has on Safari is plugins, but the most useful of
those, Firebug, is now essentially built into the new WebKit with it's
excellent debugging tools.

The JavaScript performance is blazing too. Just check out the WebKit nightly:
<http://nightly.webkit.org/>

~~~
railsjedi
I tried to use WebKit debugging tools since I like Safari and Firebug is the
only thing keeping me tied to Firefox.

Webkit Debug is ok for dom inspection, but it's horrendously bad for the on
the fly CSS modifications that Firebug excels at. It's also missing the js
eval console and several other crucial firebug features (+ yslow &
firecookie). It's really a poor substitute at the moment.

~~~
tlrobinson
"It's also missing the js eval console"

It's there, click the "Show console" button on the bottom left (looks like a
">" with 3 horizontal lines to the right)

~~~
serhei
> looks like a ">" with 3 horizontal lines to the right

.. and to think that earlier in the Mac's history the mantra for GUI design
was "a word is worth a thousand pictures" (see:
<http://www.asktog.com/columns/038MacUITrends.html>). If Apple still followed
that mantra railsjedi would have actually _noticed_ that Web Inspector had all
these awesome features.

------
Zev
There's many other problems with FF3 on OS X then the basic GUI.

Because Mozilla chose to use XUL for as much as possible instead of taking it
from Cocoa or Carbon. Nor do they share the same keyboard shortcuts (when
typing, to move to the front/end of a line in Safari, then in Firefox for
example).

By using Carbon, FF doesn't take any of the Accessibility features most other
OS X applications have (like Voiceover). Not to mention the devs will have to
rewrite these bits for 64bit support.

Grubar did a write up of FF3 vs Safari 3 awhile ago:
<http://daringfireball.net/2008/04/firefox_3_safari_3> \- other then the
Background/Foreground bit at the very beginning, it's still accurate. Though
there's still Background/Foreground issues if you look closely (the tab bar
when there are no tabs looks like a foreground window no matter where its
located for instance).

~~~
jey
" _Not to mention the devs will have to rewrite these bits for 64bit support._
"

Huh? Why? "64bit" doesn't change the APIs, at most it should take a recompile
to build against the x86-64 version of the libraries. And thanks to Universal
(fat Mach-O) binaries one single executable can contain ppc, x86, and x86-64
versions bundled right into it.

~~~
chrisbroadfoot
I think the real question is: Why the hell would you need a 64-bit browser?

~~~
Zev
If the rest of my OS is going 64bit, why shouldn't my browser? Besides, I
would imagine (unfortunately I'm not as well versed in this area as I would
like) that there would be a performance gain from using a native 64bit browser
on a 64bit OS instead of a 32bit browser on a 64bit OS.

True, some plugins for browser (I'm looking at you, Flash) aren't 64bit - yet
- but that could be vendors dragging their feet because there's not enough of
a demand. Or something else; I'm not privy to what goes on in the upper levels
of Adobe. Or any other major company for that matter, but thats not the point
of this post.

------
petercooper
Firefox 3 works on the Mac. It looks fine, and it's amazing there are people
dedicated to whining about the minutiae of a few pixels here and there. Get on
with your work people.

~~~
derefr
They're UI designers. That _is_ their work.

------
tokipin
i don't know about on Mac or Linux, but on Windows the Safari font rendering
is unacceptably ugly. it's fuzzy and blurry. it's the single reason i'm using
Firefox instead right now

i think Safari uses a custom font renderer, which on Windows is far worse than
Windows' ClearType (which Firefox takes advantage of.) _maybe_ Safari's
rendering looks good on high res monitors, but on my 1280x1024 it looks like
shit. it's almost as if it's doing three or four extra smoothing passes

here's a couple side-by-side screenshots (note, there is some bug that makes
the background of single-line text fields black):

[http://i277.photobucket.com/albums/kk63/temporaryupload/safa...](http://i277.photobucket.com/albums/kk63/temporaryupload/safari_ff1.png)

[http://i277.photobucket.com/albums/kk63/temporaryupload/safa...](http://i277.photobucket.com/albums/kk63/temporaryupload/safari_ff2.png)

and yes, i messed around with the options. it doesn't matter what strength of
font smoothing it's set to. it still looks fuzzy. in fact it looks worse on
lower smoothing settings. maybe i'm missing something, and if so, i'm all
ears. maybe i'm just experience a particular set of bugs :/

it's unfortunate because i like most of the rest of the package, especially
the fast loading and JS.

~~~
crescendo
It's really a matter of taste—i.e. whether you prefer typographic purity or
optimization for screen. The Safari fonts look better to me even in your
comparison screenshots.

~~~
tokipin
possibly. though i think the difference is significant enough that many people
(like myself) will not use Safari for that single reason. you might argue that
just as many people will use it because of that reason. but if it's true that
people go with what they are used to, then those fonts are going to look plain
blurry to most Windows users, and not much is going to sway them

it would be nice if it had the option of using the standard Windows rendering.
even without ClearType active it is distinctly better to me. i wonder how
difficult that might be to arrange (i.e. is that part of the software open
source?)

------
josefresco
Site is too slow for me to even finish the article (images won't load). Maybe
Johan should spend a little less UI critique time and a tad more on web
server/site optimization.

------
jacobbijani
I've noticed this before but it is described well here. General sloppyness all
around in Firefox.

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deathbyzen
This is really, really nitpicking. I don't notice any of the things he listed.

------
christefano
<http://www.sanneblad.se.nyud.net/johan/?p=180>

