Firefox tryout
April 20th, 2006 at 9:44 pm
I’m giving Firefox another tryout. It was my main browser on Linux almost from the time it came out, and I’ve always used it on Windows when I’ve had a choice. I’ve never given it more than a few minutes of trial on the Mac—mainly because its startup time was always much longer than Safari’s and its advantages over Safari aren’t as great as its advantages over IE—but there’s a relatively new version out, and the attraction of its many extensions (especially Greasemonkey) is strong, so I’m going to stick with it for a week or two and see if it works for me.
I’ve installed a couple of Greasemonkey scripts that fix usability problems with Bloglines:
- the focus always seems to revert to the left pane when I’d rather it stay in the right pane, and
- clicking on links opens up a new window instead of a new pane.
These have already made the Bloglines experience more pleasant.
I’ve also installed the wonderful CSkinner, which lets me override the CSS of a given page or site. This is particularly good for those sites that use fonts too tiny or with too little contrast for my mid-40s eyes.
It’s also nice to have a search bar that can search sites other than Google. I’ve loaded up Wikipedia, A9, del.icio.us, IMDB, weather.com, and Webster. The full list of search engines is here.
April 20th, 2006 at 11:56 pm
I’ve been using Camino for some time now, and I am extremely happy with it. It’s true that it doesn’t have the extensions of Firefox, but I find it much faster and lighter.
As far as site searches go, I use keywords. For instance, for Wikipedia search, I have a bookmark with keyword “wp” and location “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s&go=Go”
Then, when I type in the location bar “wp whatever”, it performs a search for “whatever” in Wikipedia. That’s a feature of both Firefox and Camino, and I would probably not use a browser that doesn’t have something similar.
April 21st, 2006 at 8:18 am
And there are addons for Safari that provide the same sort of directed searching you describe. Despite my experience at the command line, I’ve never been able to train myself to add those prefixes (“wp” in your example) to my search strings, and have always felt more comfortable picking the search site from a menu. Maybe its the years of using Firefox/Mozilla under Linux.
It’s my understanding the Greasemonkey doesn’t work with Camino, which is a dealbreaker for me. But I am curious: do you find Camino faster at rendering pages? or just in starting up?
April 21st, 2006 at 3:49 pm
The main advantage of keywords is that you can use them for any bookmark at all, not just for the standard searches. For instance, typing the course number for one of my courses takes me directly to that course’s homepage, or I could have added a bookmark so that typing “dd textmate” would use the search box in your blog page to search all your posts for the word “textmate”, or in fact any search field in any web page. If you install CamiTools, you can actually customize the list of search of search engines in the search bar in a similar manner as you did in Firefox. And also allows you to have user-defined CSS style for individual domains, and it has an interesting functionality to synchronize bookmarks along various Macs using an FTP server, which I thought was cool.
Alas, no, it doesn’t. None of the extensions do. That for me is the only benefit of Firefox atm. Camino comes with some extensions built in, so to speak. It’s more of a ready-to-go solution, but obviously much less customizable. Though it has in the preferences a lot of the functionality I would need, so I haven’t felt the need for something more specialized.
It is definitely considerably faster at starting up, and maybe slightly faster at rendering. But I basically tend to keep my browser running at all times, and I find Camino much less taxing on the system when run for extended periods of time. I’ve had to quit Firefox many times for being extremely sluggish when opening many windows with many tabs. Never had this problem with Camino.
April 28th, 2006 at 12:57 am
Thanks for the detailed followup. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to respond. For some reason, your comment got classified as spam and I didn’t find it until today. I’ll have to learn more about Movable Type’s commenting system.
I will say that after a week of use, I’m still on the fence about Firefox. Because of Greasemonkey, it does a great job of fixing the readability and/or usability of some sites that I visit frequently. But FF’s has its own usability issues—I can’t seem to stop it from wanting to use Stuffit to handle every zipped or gzipped file, for example. And the buttons and controls that seemed perfectly fine when I used FF on Linux now look clunky on OS X.
I’m going to give it some more time, then go back to Safari to see if I miss FF. Maybe I’ll give Camino a similar spin when I done with the FF test.