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Blog under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
Feb
15
(2006)
I’ve been waffling back and forth between Safari and Firefox over the last few months. The flexibility of Firefox keeps drawing me close, like a moth to a flame, only to be burned because it doesn’t “feel” right. Safari does. I’ve been slowly adding Themes and Extensions to make Firefox start to look/behave better, and it’s close. Darned close.
The thing that might push it over the threshold for me was the addition of the All-in-One Mouse Gestures extension, which combines a bunch of stuff (including Mouse Gestures) into one nice package. In Safari (and every other Cocoa app on my system) I’ve been using CocoaGestures to add powerful mouse gestures to tasks like tab switching, closing tabs, etc… But on Firefox, I had to keep reverting to the keyboard (or moving the mouse to select a tab – much more efficient to just flick the mouse and have that motion translated…) Heck, I haven’t even found a keyboard combo to switch tabs in Firefox yet…
The last two things that Safari rocks at are the integrated spel cheker, a handy key combo to put the text focus in the Google search field in the toolbar. I’ve tried the Firefox spell checker extension, with no luk.
There are key shortcuts to the search box and the google toolbar. The search box is CTRL-K, the default for Google toolbar is SHIFT-F12, CTRL-L to select the regular address bar (I think Mac is CMD instead of CTRL).
Don’t know about a spellcheck system– I never think to use one even when I have it…
Oh, and Firefox tab switching (at least in mine– I also use the wonderful and highly recommended “Tab Mix Plus” extension is: CTRL-TAB and SHIFT-CTRL-TAB to move from tab to tab, CTRL-T for a new tab, CTRL-W to close a tab. I’m big into the keyboard anywhere I can avoid the mouse!
Chris, thanks for the tips! I looked all over for the search field one – must have overlooked it. Much better now
I’m all over Fox, but sometimes it fails to render a page (like any browser- most recently the Yahoo greeting cards)
Darn, I was not quick enough with the command-K. It is a lifesaver. Firefox also provides the google search via a control click on a highlighted phasse in a page.
I also like the Tab X extension because it adds a close “X” box to all tabs.
The one thing Safari did that I miss was the full completing of URLs as you type in the URL bar, like entering a url of “www.darc” would complete out the nearest match to “www.daracynorman.net”.
Firefox is definitely getting better, too. The text rendering is a touch better in Safari (and it has some additional CSS3 stuff like text dropshadows that Fox doesn’t have yet)
My tweaked Firefox config feels definitely usable, though. And works with everything (so far) including the fancy schmancy WYSIWYG editors in Drupal and WordPress.
Gotta LOVE Adblock and Greasemonkey, though!
Tab-Mix lets you put close boxes on tabs too– plus other cool stuff. Not sure about URL completion– is that a Mac Firefox thing? PC Ffx does completion for me– well, kind of in that weird windows way…
I prefer ALT-D for the address bar and CTRL-E for the search box. Goes much easier when you do CTRL-T for a new tab and CTRL-E to start entering a search query.