Fire Foxy
Well, tonight I did something rather unexpected. After finishing up what I hope is the final draft for The Archiver’s 12th issue (coming soon to a virtual news stand near you!), I decided to delve into making Firefox my default browser. Anyone following this blog knows how much I’ve hated on Firefox’s appearance in OS X in the past, and I’ve actually made several unpublished attempts at ranting about the almost-but-not-quite-there default theme in Firefox 3, so this is quite a change of heart.
There were several things that ultimately pushed me over the edge. First was Firefox 3’s support for Aqua controls. Second, the absolutely stunning GrApple theme by Aronnax, which fits in with OS X so much better than the default Firefox theme does (though I must say that OS X is the only OS that really makes the new Keyhole back/forward control look good). Third, Delicious finally put out a beta of their new extension for Firefox 3, which was the single most important functionality requirement I had for switching to Firefox 3 full-time.
I had to do a little bit of tweaking to get the Delicious extension to look the way I wanted… the only thing that really bugged me was how ugly the default tag icons looked against the dark gray of OS X’s windows. In the end, I probably spent 45 minutes pouring through Firefox’s innards looking for the extension and the icons it uses. Since the icons ended up being inside the .jar file bundled with the extension, I had to get creative and figure out how to tweak the user chrome (not to mention dig through tons of CSS in the Delicious .jar to find the right class) to make the changes I wanted. Not being in the mood to build a new tag icon from scratch, I went the simplicity route and just removed the tag icon completely, then halving the size of the space it took up to provide more bookmark bar-like spacing between the dropdown lists (I use Favorite Tag view). I also bolded the text to make it a bit more like the bookmark bar. If I feel up to it tomorrow, I might go crazy and dig up the actual style for the bookmark bar items to use in the user chrome for the Delicious toolbar.
I’m going to run Firefox 3 as my default browser on the Mac as an experiment for a week or so, and see if the system is more responsive after leaving the browser up under load for several days than it typically is under Safari. A lot of my problems with memory usage would probably be aleviated by just cramming more RAM into this thing, but I’m trying to be cheap right now.
April 28th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
GAH. I wrote a whole reply to this, and then your site ate it. Not a valid message? What does that mean, interrobang..
grr.
well, here’s the gist.
we could put a new board on your desk that has a space in it for the computer and inset it, so the thing is still the correct distance from your face, but lower than the giant thing would be ON the shelf. it also gives you extra space.
I seriously do NOT want to sell it through mac odessy, because not only do we have to go all the way out to Cour d’Alene to get there, but I think you will be computerless for a great while if you go through them, and have the 30% taken out. I don’t think they could sweeten it enough that you would have all the money and credits for a new computer when you sell your old one, and I know from experience that we won’t be able to raise even a hundred dollars in several months for an extra expense.. even if it’s planned.
Also.. site related.. if you hit newID, it completely wipes the text boxes. fortunately I copied my text this time though.