Simon Thulbourn

Firefox 3 is to be released on the 17th (if you’re reading this after the 17th, it’s been released, Hurrah!), but don’t get too excited, whilst the Mozilla developers have done a good job trying to integrate Firefox into OS X, but it’s not complete — I’d prefer Firefox to look closer to Safari — the toolbar buttons are too rounded, as is the address bar and there are a few other annoyances.

But there’s hope in making Firefox fit in to OS X a little better through the use of themes and plugins. The theme I’m currently using for Firefox is GrApple Yummy (screenshot)

I’m also using Fission (screenshot) to allow Firefox to have a page progress bar like Safari, by that I mean the page loading progress is now in the address bar. I find this to be better purely because there’s no “extra” controls to be displayed on the page.

Now that’s the way Firefox looks out of the way, I can move on to the behaviour of Firefox, by this I mean the way Firefox acts. As many people who used Firefox 2 will know, Firefox doesn’t allow the user to use the System Preferences proxy settings, but there’s hope in form of a plugin called System Proxy, system proxy does exactly what Firefox doesn’t allow out of the box.

Another problem with Firefox (if you can call it a problem), Firefox doesn’t use the multi-touch features of OS X if you’re fortunate enough to have a Macbook Pro or a Macbook Air. But if you’ve had either of these computers for a reasonable amount of time, you may have found a preference pane called MultiClutch. MultiClutch allows a user to set a list of predefined gestures to any application. I use MultiClutch to allow for zoom actions and back/forward actions that users are used to in Safari.

If you’re not a developer, thanks for reading this post, but if you are, there’s more! At the time of writing this post, http://getfirebug.com was down and has been down for about a week. Some kind person on the internet has made a mirror of sorts, and uploaded the XPI file, to which you need to install any plugin. Anyway, it’s located on NPIRE

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