Firefox 3 Brings Ugliness to the Mac

by jacobbijani on 6/15/2008, 8:37 PM with 41 comments
  • by tlrobinson on 6/15/2008, 9:20 PM

    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/

  • by Zev on 6/15/2008, 9:15 PM

    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).

  • by petercooper on 6/16/2008, 4:09 AM

    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.

  • by tokipin on 6/15/2008, 11:08 PM

    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/safa...

    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.

  • by josefresco on 6/16/2008, 2:10 PM

    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.

  • by jacobbijani on 6/15/2008, 8:38 PM

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

  • by deathbyzen on 6/16/2008, 7:10 PM

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

  • by christefano on 6/16/2008, 12:43 AM