Firefox 3
Downloaded and installed beta 3 tonight. Still not sure if I actually like it or not… it’s more like a Mac application now, to be sure, but it’s still off in slight ways that seem to be pushing some sort of HIG uncanny valley. It also behaves slightly different from Safari in ways that still kind of annoy me. Specifically, if a list of items in Firefox (be it of tabs or bookmarks in the toolbar) extends beyond the limits of the window, the fly-out lists all of the items in the list, not just those that were hidden from view to begin with, which interrupts the flow of my actions as I have to re-parse the whole list again to get to the “end”, where the items I was looking for start showing up. Also, the close button remains on the wrong side of the tab, and the tabs themselves are really, really wide compared to the default tab width in Safari. I should also note that the WordPress WYSIWYG editor (which I have enabled for use with Firefox at work, and which Safari ignores) is of the opinion that I am misspelling virtually everything in this post, sometimes only a few letters at a time. It also doesn’t recognize Cmd+left as a way to get to the start of a line; instead, it tries to go back one page. Grr.
All of the UI elements are also really round, which is just weird since every other Mac application using the metal button scheme has squared-off buttons. I respect that the Firefox team is working hard on OS integration with this release, but I just don’t think it’s quite there yet. Still, it’s miles better than it was in FX2. They even started using Aqua, hooray!
Once the delicious library add-on is updated to work with FX3 (and to be fair, once it’s out of beta), I’ll give it a thorough head-to-head against Safari and see which one works best for me. I’m not married to the idea of using Safari, but so far, Camino and Firefox just aren’t doing much to make me want to use them instead, beyond being notably more stable when it comes to handling flash-heavy sites.