Firefox to Safari Revisited: A Thorough How-To

I was telling Judith about my earlier post about making Firefox look and function more like Safari, and she said I should write up a more thorough how to ~~so that she could do it without reading all over the web~~ for you, our dearest readers, so here it goes:
firefox to safari

The above screenshot looks like Safari, but it is, in fact, Firefox. Read on for the step-by-step for how to get your Firefox to look the same and the tabs to behave the same as in Safari.

Step 1: Safarish Theme—Launch Firefox. Go to this page on Ran Aroussi's blog. Click on the large red lettered click here in the middle of the post. You will see a message like this (but without the odd distortion; dunno what happened with that screenshot):
safarish install

Click "OK." The theme will install, but will not activate until you restart. If for some reason you don't see this dialogue, but instead a warning comes up asking if you should enable installations from this website, then click yes, allow, and then go back to the beginning of this step and try again.

Step 2: Quit Firefox and Relaunch Firefox.

Step 3: Install Tab X Extension—Go to the post at Hicksdesign that I linked to in my previous post and click on the link to install Tab X [or simply click here]. The following dialog will pop up:
tabx install

Click the Open with radio button and browse to your Application folder and select Firefox. Click OK. The extension will install but won't become active until after you restart Firefox. Again, if a warning comes up asking if you should enable installations from this website, then click yes, allow, and then go back to the beginning of this step and try again.

Step 4: Quit Firefox and Relaunch Firefox.

Step 5: Edit / Create userChrome.css—Now you need to go back to Hicksdesign and take note of his instructions for editing your userChrome.css file. This file is located in ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/[YOURPROFILE]/chrome/
If there is no userChrome.css file there, then you will have to create one in a nice clean text editor, like SubEthaEdit, TextWrangler, or BBEdit. Open a new file, save it as userChrome.css and type the following:

/* Tab X mods */
/* ------------------------------------------------------- */

/* make sure you have Tab X installed first:
http://www.gnarfle.com/tabxmac.xpi */

.tabs-closebutton {
    padding-bottom: 0 !important;
     }

.tabs-closebutton-box { /* hides the tab bar close button */
    display: none !important;
}

Save the file again and close your text editor. UPDATE: Or you can simply use this userChrome.css file that I whipped up based on Hicks' file.

Step 6: Restart Firefox.

Step 7: Looking Good—Everything should already look pretty much like Safari at this point. If it doesn't, then go into Tools-->Themes and make sure Safarish is loaded, and then go into Tools-->Extensions and make sure that Tab X Mac is loaded. If it still doesn't look quite right, make sure that you saved the userChrome.css file in the right spot and with the correct info.

Step 8: SessionSaver for Firefox—One of my favorite things in Safari is actually functionality added by Saft: the ability to remember what tabs were open before you accidentally quit the program or suffered a program crash. Enter SessionSaver. Go to Tools-->Extensions, and click on the Get More Extensions link which will take you here. Click on the Tabbed Browsing link in the sidebar. On the next page, scroll down to SessionSaver and click on install. Let install. It will be activated after you restart.

Step 9: Quit Firefox. Restart Firefox. Ta-da! You're done!

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I was telling Judith about my earlier post about making Firefox look and function more like Safari, and she said I should write up a more...

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GrApple -Aronnax'sFirefox Themes http://www.grapple.net.tf/ Go to this site and download mac oriented themes I think these themes are better than the one posted. makesure to have tabx from http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/tabx If you are going to use these themes, make sure not to apply the safaritab from hicksdesign(hick's safaritab will break the look of tab-designs of these themes).

September 22 2005 at 3:12 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

C.K. Sample, III

Cool, Thomas. Let me know what you think after you give it a thorough whirl. Things you may be interested in for Safari: Saft. Find it on Versiontracker. Cool little plugin.

April 16 2005 at 4:44 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Hmm, actually, I just upgraded to 10.3.9 and safari seems to handle big pages *much* better. Almost as well as firefox. Makes me hopeful about 10.4.

April 16 2005 at 12:37 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

I really like safari, but, uh, it sucks for big pages. Go try to load a 1.3MB page that is all HTML in safari and see how long it beachballs while the page is loading. Load the same page in firefox and see what happens. If they fixed that in 10.4, I'm ready to go back to safari. Assuming I can get a bugmenot plugin. If you want a page to test this on, try: http://chowhound.com/midwest/boards/chicago/chicago.html 2.6MB of html goodness. You'll see what I mean. Hardware: 15" aluminum powerbook and a 12" aluminum powerbook, with 512 and 768mb of ram and 1.25 and 1.33ghz g4s respectively. There's no reason for safari to beachball on that stuff.

April 16 2005 at 12:22 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

tom

CK: I am posting this comment from Safari. Having switched from windows towards the end of the last year, I didn't like Safari because, well, it just didn't feel like Firefox. I copied most of my bookmarks into Safari, and I decided, after the comments back and forth on this post, that I will give Safari a fair shot. Hell, I gave OS X a shot, why not Safari?

April 15 2005 at 9:38 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

David Werjefelt

The tabs are UPSIDEDOWN! I just can't get accustomed to Safaritabs being upside down, that is they are open upwards, and closed downwards - towards the page they represent.

April 15 2005 at 7:11 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Ludwig

I don't like people that post back to back, oh well... this is more of a question to TUAW staff. While I was checking out the display differences of your new site in Safari & Camino (great look by the way) I noticed something odd. I have iScroll installed on my PB which allows scrolling from side to side, and within the posts section I am able to do just that, scroll from left to right within this table, as if it was a separate browser window. Sorry that I don't know the exact technical terms to desribe it properly but I haven't seen this happen before and was wondering if it was intentional.

April 15 2005 at 7:10 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Ludwig

Safari? Firefox? ahem... Camino? I guess it's a personal choice in the end but for me Camino performs much better than both the above mentioned. Of course there are things that it's missing from other browsers, but cause it's so lightweight is why I made it my default browser. Truth is I spend more time in NetNewsWire nowadays that any other browser. Just my 2 pence...

April 15 2005 at 6:19 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Laurie

Andy - if tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, you can still hear me scream :) I hate Firefox. No matter how many ways you can make it LOOK like Safari or behave in minor ways like Safari, it still won't be Safari. My Safari is a lean, mean, speedy browsing machine. Firefox is... not. (so odd to see C.K. agree with me... I'm still kind of in shock about that one)

April 15 2005 at 6:11 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

C.K. Sample, III

Hey, Pedro, Sorry I made the tutorial for OS X. If you want to do the same thing on a windoze box you'll need to use a different flavor of the themes.

April 15 2005 at 6:10 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply