My latest switch: Safari to Firefox 3

jasfa131

The Lone Deranger
I've noticed myself putting up with Safari's minor inconveniences for too long, so I hesitantly downloaded Mozilla's new Firefox 3.0 today. After about 20 minutes of logging in to my bookmarked websites, and adjusting settings, I've got everything running very well actually. It's more elegant and (noticeably) quicker than Safari on my i(ntel)Mac 2.0GHz. But, I have to admit, I'm REALLY missing the "Activity" box (accessed from Window--->Activity). I really favored using it to downloaded buried files in websites (like YouTube .flv's, for example).


Basically:
Firefox!, love it!, activity box?
 
There are enough add-ons for Firefox that can possibly make up for it. Just browse through the selections in the Add-Ons selection under the Tools menu.

I'm still on the last RC release. Hope to get the final version soon.
 
I just installed 3.0 final and I have to say it's really gotten a lot better since the betas and release candidates. Kudos to the Mozilla team for a great release.
 
I’ve been running 3 RCs for some time. I didn’t even realize last night when it told me there was an update that it was to the final.

I use both Safari and Firefox and often have both running at the same time. Safari supports services which I use all the time and its page search is killer. For web work I usually use Firefox.

If you haven’t already you’ll probably want to go to about:config in Firefox and switch this to false as I have.

ff3urlbar.png
 
But the scrolling in FF3, yuk!
Even The Smart Scroll utility can't make FireFox scrolling acceptable.

jb.
 
I also realised that the FF works more faster then the Safari. I tried opening the same site of both and felt that FF takes less time to load it.
 
But the scrolling in FF3, yuk!
Even The Smart Scroll utility can't make FireFox scrolling acceptable.

jb.

True, it's not as smooth as Safari when it comes to scrolling but for me it's tolerable. Don't know if this still plays a factor, but it's something to take into account as well.

For me, Firefox's portability wins out over the extra performance gains from Safari.
 
I’ve been running 3 RCs for some time. I didn’t even realize last night when it told me there was an update that it was to the final.

I use both Safari and Firefox and often have both running at the same time. Safari supports services which I use all the time and its page search is killer. For web work I usually use Firefox.

If you haven’t already you’ll probably want to go to about:config in Firefox and switch this to false as I have.

ff3urlbar.png
What does that do exactly, and how do I do that?
 
What does that do exactly, and how do I do that?
When you click in the url bar (address bar) does the first click highlight the entire url? The default is yes and it’s a pain in the ****.

To change that behavior type about:config in the address bar and you’ll be taken to advanced prefs.

The easiest way to find that particular pref (or any for that matter) is to type the first few characters into the search bar at the top, eg: “browser.url”

Once you’ve found it, double click to change it to false.
 
Another thing I found today via MacOSXHints is a pdf plugin for Firefox...

firefox-mac-pdf

It lets you view pdfs in Firefox. I’m on PPC and it works fine although at first it didn’t seem to work at all.

I opened a PDF which consists purely of scan images, a tractor mower manual. I couldn’t see a thing, only white. Then I figured out that the display was huge. I had to zoom out several times to get one page at a time within the browser frame.

Regular PDFs don’t seem to suffer from this issue.
 
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