A while back I got a fair amount of traffic to my Firefox on Mac OS X Annoyances posting, iin which I complained about the screwed up key bindings and other things.
The good news it that with the release of 1.0, that's been fixed! It minimizes just like it should. I'm finally able to switch from Safari to Firefox as my default browser on Mac OS X--just like I use on Linux, BSD, and Windows.
As I said in my Is Firefox for Seearch? post on the Yahoo Search blog, thanks to the worldwide Firefox developer community. This is a real milestone. We've come a long way since the great disappointment.
Posted by jzawodn at November 09, 2004 03:32 PM
Is that the regular version you're using?
I here this optimized version for G4 and G5 are even faster.
http://www.beatnikpad.com/archives/2004/11/06/firefoxG5
Might be just me, but I've noticed a big jump in page loading speed for Firefox 1.0 on Linux (upgraded from 0.9). Tried it on XP as well, and the speed increase is just as noticable on that platform too.
And the RSS integration is uber-cool.
Firefox its great and I do like it, but in the other hand I dont find real reasons with the latest Safari improvements -for the base user- to switch as I do in Windows or Linux beyond unfiying a multi-OS environment. But its just me.
Have you ever thought about writing a part 2 to your disapppointment/resignation letter? Much of what you wrote about not only dealt with the technology changes necessary to make Mozilla prosper, but the cultural changes which were required. Obviously, the Mozilla foundation and Firefox have succeeded by addressing many of the shortcomings you identified back in 1999.
It would be interesting to determine who the leaders were, and how they made the changes. How did a small team innovate with other contributors via open source? What were the key events that helped right the ship? Etc.
I love Firefox, but have been a steadfast Mosaic _ Netscape - Mozilla fan since the NCSA days. Many thanks to everyone who has contributed since the beginning.
i think someone has confused jeremy zawodny and jamie zawinski.
Chris,
The G5 optimized version rocks!! I like how it didn't change the look of the browser to keep it consistent with the "regular" version but the speed bump is noticeable.
All that remains to be done is a Bookmarks synchronizer with .mac like Safari...
I'm glad to hear that Firefox has been fixed to run on Mac OSX, but I'll be mad if they've moved the close tab button to each tab like Safari. I've recently switched to Mac OSX and I hate that feature in Safari. I'm so used to just quickly clicking on a tab to switch to it and now when I use Safari I'm always closing tabs on accident. It makes me crazy. Plus Safari is soooo much sloooowwweeerrr then FireFox it will be nice to use Firefox on Mac OS X.
Erik
Jeremy, you're still using a g4 powerbook right?
try the optimized build:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=149532
I too have stopped using safari over the past few days.
this bookmark exporter ( http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/11550 ) helped too
I have tried out optimized builds on my P3 and Athlon systems. Nice, but not worth the hassle. I prefer to stick to the standard installer distribution simply because I don't really care about milliseconds of extra performance. I do, however, have some custom preferences set to speed things up. But those are neatly stored in my profile. And when I upgrade to the next "release" version, they will still be there and will still work.
You say we've come a long way? True, but it took us 6.5 years to come this far! That's pretty pathetic for Internet Time. I know that software projects are always late and over budget, but in this particular case the lateness surely helped MSIE gain essentially 100% market share. As an outside observer I still see the whole Mozilla project as a great disappointment (esp when you compare to Perl, Apache, or heck, even Eclipse). jwz was smart to get out when he did.
Of course, the Firefox product as it is today is quite good -- it's replaced MSIE as my primary browser. But 6.5 years is about 5.0 years too many.
The optimized builds sound great. I haven't tried one yet but may. The standard one is rocking pretty well already.
Hmm, I just tried Firefox for OS X and they're still using Windows-style UI widgets. Highly annoying. Even more highly annoying is that Camino just doesn't cut it for me. But maybe I'm just one of those OS X GUI snobs.
I agree with the previous poster on the UI - UI is important - perhaps more so on OS X. And Firefox just doesn't look right when it comes to forms, buttons, radio buttons etc.
It's a nice browser. Would be even nicer if they'd let the backspace button on my PB behave like a back button. Safari does, Opera does, IE does, Firefox doesn't.
Did anyone succeed in installing Java on Firefox for Mac OS X? I've had no luck: the applet will display, but then dies after user interaction.
Owen
Really like Firefox 1.0 on Mac OS X. Only annoyance is the window zoom when opening a new window. Always takes up the entire screen. Anyone know how to correct this?
So how did you solve the emacs key bindings problem? I have iKey, a keyboard macro utility, and have installed the common ones (^A ^E ^F ^B ^P ^N ^D ...) and bound them to universal things like right/left arrow and so on.
