Yes, I really do (yes, I’m talking about the web browser, not the movie). And yet I use it every day. There are things that I like about Firefox – plugins like Aardvark, Firebug and Web developer, for example – but as a whole, I think it’s a lousy web browser.
Take its text rendering, for example. Since the primary purpose of a web browser is to get text on the screen, you’d think they’d have that right. But no, apparently version 2.0 is still too early to expect decent text rendering. Compare these two snaps:
| Firefox | Safari |
|---|---|
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How has Firefox managed to screw up the fixed-pitch text so badly? It’s just plain illegible! I have absolutely know idea, but however they really should have fixed this kind of thing before version 1.0 – not left it in at 2.0. How about italic text. Maybe they could get that right:
| Firefox | Safari |
|---|---|
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Once again, Safari has rendered it beautifully, but Firefox looks like it’s using a synthetic oblique style, the way System 6 used to when you didn’t have an italic version of the font available – it’s most noticeable in the capital S. And then when you select the text, some of the last italic letter gets cut off. Come on, this is pretty basic stuff, guys!
On the topic of selection, Firefox won’t use Mac conventions in handling double-click and drag. It’s supposed to select whole words, but Firefox selects just one whole word. The same goes for triple-click and drag for lines. (Yes, I know Safari’s selection behaviour isn’t quite standard, and there’s no excuse for that, either.) And speaking of things being non-standard, why can’t Firefox use standard OS widgets? For example, the drop-down menus from items on the bookmark bar don’t respond to clicks in the same way as regular menus (items with submenus, in particular). The controls on forms just look like horrible Windows wannabes:
| Firefox | Safari |
|---|---|
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Safari is more usable, too. In Firefox’s bookmarks window, why can’t I drag object from the tree view in the left-hand pane? Why can’t I rename or edit a link in-place, rather than clicking the Properties or Rename button? Speaking of which, why are there two buttons, when both of them bring up exactly the same sheet, with exactly the same text field selected? And on the topic of bookmarks, when I try to drag the URL to the bookmarks bar, Firefox puts a tooltip in the way to thwart my efforts:
When you have lots of tabs on the same site, Safari cuts off any common prefix it can find in the titles, so you have more chance of knowing which is which:
| Firefox |  |
|---|---|
| Safari |  |
And on top of this, there are the small things. Like ripping a YouTube video, for example – in Safari, you can easily find it in the activity window, and hold option and double-click. Firefox won’t use the system-wide spelling dictionaries. Firefox takes longer to launch.
So if I hate it, why do I use it? First of all, on Linux and Windows there’s no meaningful competition. On the Mac, Safari has three flaws that are too bad to live with: it can’t deal with table cells spanning multiple rows in XHTML (although it can in regular HTML – this mystifies me), it doesn’t deal with character entities correctly in XHTML and it gives you the spinning pinwheel of death far too often.
