Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

Sounds like he hasn't even looked at linux. There really is no competition on it - everything else is broken.

I gave the webkit browser a try the other day, and if that's what Safari does to webpages then I feel sorry for OS X users.

Have you read his FF2 review?
http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/firefox2.asp

Big fan of FF (since forever) but I still don't like FF on my PowerBook G4. It's waaaaay slower than Safari.

The reason why I don't use Firefox instead of Safari is because of the lack of keychain integration. Right now, I can switch between Camino and Safari, and Camino will pickup the passwords saved by Safari and vice versa.

Also, I don't particularly like the FF3 UI although it's a definite improvement over FF2. To me it looks over complicated and still doesn't quite look like a Mac application. The oversized back button gives the game away, it makes FF3 look like a Vista app masquerading as an OS X app. The toolbar gradient is just plain wrong. Whilst efforts have been made to make form controls act and look like Mac native controls, drop down lists are just bizarre. Johan Sanneblad describes these issues better than I do. http://www.sanneblad.se/johan/?p=180

Still, the issues that I've pointed out are minor ones for most users, and from what I've seen FF3 is a great browser.

@Paul Grave

1password is compatible with Firefox and is a nice way to share passwords between browsers and integrate Firefox with the keychain.

Firefox is good, but the fact that guy makes Internet Explorer sound better than Safari decreases his credibility...

Stifu, I don't know about that. Safari on Windows is atrocious. There's not a single thing that feels "Windows" about it. It's that darned QuickTime toolkit that they use for all of their Windows apps that just does not fit in at all on Windows -- not one bit.

Any Windows advocate will rightly decry such a confusing and foreign behaving and looking app just as Mac advocates did with Firefox (before Firefox 3, and even some after Firefox 3.) At least with Firefox, we're _trying_ to be a good Mac citizen. Safari on Windows isn't even trying, not one bit. Not only that, they're "OK with it" that Safari can be used to carpetbomb the Windows desktop. That's an unfortunate security stance coming from Apple that shows even further that they don't care about the Windows desktop.

I don't see anything wrong with noting that IE 7 is a much better Windows browser than Safari. I tend to agree.

I know Safari doesn't even try to integrate with Windows, but that's not a "bug", just a bad or lazy decision. But putting the appearance aside, what about the site rendering, standards support and all that? If Safari is buggy, then IE is super buggy...

Ew, so many factual errors. Does he do any research at all?

The throbber to the left of the address bar does not replace the throbber on the top right; it serves a different purpose. Surely he noticed it throbbing while typing in the location bar rather than while loading a site, or didn't he load any sites?

The search plugins are not plugins of the same sort as, say, the Adobe Reader plugin or the Flash plugin. If he had bothered to look in the new "Plugins" tab on the Add-ons dialog he would have seen that.

Looks like he doesn't quite grasp the concept of plugins and how they are different to extensions. This lack of understanding would be fine for someone who is an end-user; they don't have to know such a thing. But this guy is speaking about technical things in a technical blog about which he doesn't understand, while pretending that he does.

Clicking the star in the location bar a second time does not remove the bookmark. Again, did he even try doing this? I mean why write about it if you haven't bothered to even try it out? It brings up a popup letting you organise that bookmark and, yes, one button in that popup is for deleting it. Clicking the star a second, third or 103rd time will not remove the bookmark though.

A green site button has nothing to do with a site being password-protected or encrypted. Again, surely this is obvious, though I guess he may have only tested it on sites that also happened to be password-protected and failed to notice that some encrypted sites may be blue instead. But clicking the button would have told him this information.

I'm fairly sure that the word "Places" is not used for the library, only the terms "Library" and "Organise bookmarks...". Therefore his complaint about sometimes calling it "Places" and other times calling it "Library" is unfounded. Places was only a name used in development. How could end users be confused about something which doesn't appear anywhere in the final product? Unless I am missing something.

The "Clear list" button in the downloads window is not new to version 3 (actually, earlier builds of Firefox 3 omitted it; it was later reinstated as it was in version 2).

Hinting, cleartype and anti-aliasing are not new to Firefox 3 on Windows.

I don't really know Paul Thurrot but now I know to avoid reading what he writes.

Paul probably hasn't had a chance to try Opera 9.5 ;)