Fission

I'm a Camino man, but this latest release of Firefox has me thinking of switching. They've just done a fantastic job with it.

As for Safari, aside from the ugly brushed metal, there's one thing keeping me from using it: When you open a tab, the height of the browser window increases, but when you get rid of the tab, the window doesn't go back to normal. Us obsessive-compulsive types won't stand for that sort of thing. ;)

BugMeNot To get around having to register at news and photo sites.

del.icio.us To streamline my location free bookmarking. It's all Web 2.0 up in your face!

Download Statusbar I just started using this but it follows my ideal of keeping everything in one window. It lines up download progress bars at the bottom of the window instead of in a separate window.

Gmail Manager So I can know when I've got mail and stuff.

Google Browser Sync To uh, sync my browsers. Actually this one is kind of annoying. It doesn't handle you having concurrent logins and throws up annoying messages as a result.

Tab Mix Plus! I am lost without it now that Firefox 2 is out. It will be updated in a day or so but it's not soon enough

Greasmonkey! Solely to use the GMail Macro script which assigns key commands to functions in GMail and gives auto complete, Quicksilver like functionality to labeling of messages. I can not even explain how useful this is. I fly through my In Box three times as fast with it. You can read an outdated page with a really long thread about it here: http://persistent.info/archives/2005/12/23/greasemonkey and check out a Google Group on the subject here: http://groups-beta.google.com/group/gmail-power-users

"Before I switched to Mac a year ago I used Firefox to avoid IE6, but now Safari suits me just fine. Is Firefox for OS X really any better than Safari?"

Yes, it is. Things like typeahead find, the optional tab browsing extensions, and the like make Firefox a lot more powerful, and for me, a much more pleasant browsing experience. Safari is certainly very fast and a nice browser, but I've tried to switch (tried Saft, its typeahead find and tab customizations are much weaker) and found it's just not up to par in features.

Type-o...


I meant to say "undoclosetab"

Well, I switched about 6 months ago and used Firefox exclusively on XP before that. When I first switched over, I found Safari to be excellent - tight integration, fast response, nice design. But I soon found that some of the sites I visited (a very small amount, but still annoying) wouldn't load properly, or at all. Also, Safari has a very annoying bug where the mouse will completely disappear (randomly?) and I have to quit the app and restart to fix it.

That being said, Firefox has very few problems for me and starts quickly on my MBP, especially with an optimized build. It also can be configured and tweaked to look and act almost exactly the way I want it to through extensions and userchrome tweaks. I know Safari has some ability to expand and morph through external plugins, but the degree is far smaller.

I love the look of Safari and some of the features are very useful, hence the unified stop and reload button extension mentioned above and fission, which saves even more space and simplifies the interface. Themes that mimic Safari are only complimenting its design and keeping with a familiar, unified look in using firefox with OSX.

But to each his/her own. If Safari works well for you, then use it. I use firefox as my default browser and Safari as my backup for the very rare occasion that a page won't render. Meanwhile, my eyes don't burn too much looking at the Safari-like firefox window. ;)

***Extensions I use***

Right-Click-Link
Opens select text (or URL text with no embedded link) in a new tab.

undocloetab
Adds "Undo Close Tab."

Popup Alt Attribute
Popups alternate texts of images (as Firefox only pops-up "title" but not "alt" tooltips for images).

Greasemonkey
A User Script Manager for Firefox. It's what you make it...kinda like Quicksilver is.

Flashblock
Replaces Flash objects with a button you can click to view them.

Adblock
Blocks ads and allows you to selectively block images.

Filterset.G
Companion extension to Adblock or Adblock+ that auto-updates adblock filters.

Brandon:

I use firefox instead of safari for two reasons... #1 is that Safari has always suffered from the dreaded spinning beachball. I get several times an hour where it freezes up for 5-10 seconds. Really annoying... Other people report the same problems, while some others don't, so I don't know what the deal is...

Second reason is the extensions. There are just many things that firefox extensions offer that you can't do in safari.

The downside to firefox is that it isn't the speediest thing around, especially when you load it up with extensions. It's a tradeoff for me. Camino is much speedier, however one thing that's annoyed me about it is that it's save passwords feature only saves one username/password per domain. On my domains I have several web based apps where I may need to log in as an admin, an sql user or my user account and camino can't do that as firefox does.

As for other cool firefox extensions, I'm digging Cooliris Previews. Basically when you hover your mouse over a link (or over an icon it puts next to a link, or when holding down control and hover over a link), it opens that page in a small window on the page you are viewing, which dissapears when you mouse out. It's handy for google search results, forums, etc where you can take a quick look at each page without having to open and close new tabs.

This is an honest question, not a snarky jab: Why so many comments about "make it look just like safari," "making my Firefox mimic Safari," "Safari-like extension," and so on? Why not just use Safari?!

Before I switched to Mac a year ago I used Firefox to avoid IE6, but now Safari suits me just fine. Is Firefox for OS X really any better than Safari? It seems a lot easier to just *use* Safari than to go through the trouble of *making-Firefox-look-just-like- Safari-but-without-the-soul.*

Doesn't greasemonkey do something similar?

does anyone know of a plugin that does the kind of thing that "site alteration" does in safari stand?