Firefox 1.0 is out 'n about

Crashed on me after two minutes while clicking for a popup screen with a Quicktime movie (wich Safari does without a hickup). I guess v. 1 still needs some ironing ...
But it's fast, faster than Safari.

The Mac-tuned version (1.1) is due in the new year.

They weren't going to make a big deal out of 1.0 for the Mac but they were getting such good user feedback even without the final Mac polish that they released it at the same time as Windows and Linux.

Despite all the hype about firefox, I never bothered trying it until today. I must say, though there are a couple decent features, it's worse than Safari. I get much faster load times with Safari and it seems "snappier" as an app. Obviously some people don't agree with me, but I'm totally sticking with Safari.

I've never heard much praise for Firefox from Mac users. After all we've got Safari, Camino, Omniweb (my personal pick) etc.
Windows and Linux users don't really have as great a range of quality browsing options, so they're a bit more gung-ho about it. And obviously, though they've made some big strides recently, Firefox doesn't have the system integration or native Look'n'Feel that Mac users are generally looking for.

The killer for me is inline spellchecking, which is coming to Firefox soon-ish, and is available as an add-on right now, but honestly, after using the built in system-wide spellcheck in Mac OS X, all these app specific spellcheckers are positively stone-age.

Having said that, anyone who develops websites should stop reading this right now and download Firefox plus the webdevelopers extension. It is life-changingly good if that's your field.

I was about to say the same thing. Safari is simply the best browser,I can't wait till they release v1.3 with Tiger. I have been seeing Firefox during it's development and while I think it is a great browser (better than IE and Mozilla) I still think that Safari is much better.

But as "stuider...likeafox" said, we got Safari so Firefox won't be such a boom on the Mac as it is in Windows where there is no Safari and IE dominates.

Actually, from what I gather, Safari 1.3 will be out for Panther and Safari 2.0 will come with Tiger.

Firefoxy http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/24768 makes Firefox right at home on the Mac (well almost...)

I've dumped Safari for Firefox already. In fact, also dumped Mail.app for Thunderbird at nearly the same time.

The Apple philoshophy of keeping everything simple has its drawbacks if you like to customize everything. I find Firefox exceedingly customizable while Safari (and Mail.app) lacking behind.

Firefox is blazingly fast, much faster than Safari in my experience. Turn on HTTP pipelining (which is disabled by default) and it flies even faster!

Even better, you can get G4 (the newer PPC7450) optimized versions http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=149532 as well as G5 optimized versions http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=156735 and get faster and faster! These are unofficial builds though, so if you're not comfortable with that...

Firefox rocks! Sorry Safari (and Mail.app)

I know nothing about Firefox. What customizability do you like most? Also, does it have the trademark Safari stall when flipping from one tab to another?

--B

hey, i think, if safari didn't exist, firefox would be the browser of choice. of course, we DO have safari, so it's kind of a moot point. i try to keep a healthy compliment of browsers on my machine, just in case: Explorer, Safari, Firefox, Mozilla, Opera (ugh), OMNIWeb, and Firefox is still pretty good, and small (Mozilla is 45 MB!).

and hey, like it or not, please, if you have Windows-using co-workers or friends/family, FORCE-FEED firefox to them if you must. the web must be taken back from stupid proprietary formats from Redmond.

My favorites customizability options...

Always use my fonts, ignoring the specified fonts on the website. I recall a discussion earlier that Safari tries to preserve the website as the designer created it, but if you understand HTML, you'll appreciate that websites should be viewed the way the viewer wants it, not the way the designer wants it.

For a while, Safari didn't have a minimum font size feature, which Firefox had for a long time. Further, a size 11 minimum font size is different in size depending on the actual font used. So, if you specified using your own fonts, you'll be sure of consistent behavior.

Cookie preferences. You can disable cookies in general but allow only a few trusted sites (like this forum) to put cookies on your machine. You can do the same with images (ie allow images only from some sites or vice versa) and popup windows also.

Cache customizability. You can even browse your cache to extract certain files or graphics that you might want to copy out. To take this further, when browsing a page, with embedded multimedia stuff (like SWF, MOV, etc), you can hit Apple-I and see all the elements in that page and save whichever you want.

Customize javascript behavior. You can disable scripts' ability to resize windows, hide status bar, change status bar text, etc... And the best, disallow Javascript attempts to disable right clicks (or command clicks).

Find as you type, now with text highlighting and all!

Always open every window as a tab. Even popups. Some people may not like it, but I do. But hey, the behavior is customizable! You can even load groups of bookmarks in a series of tabs. Why bookmark one page, when you can bookmark five simultaneously?

RSS already available, while you have to wait for (and pay for) Safari 2.0 to get this functionality.

More advanced things are like using HTTP pipelining, allow SSL pages to be cached, setting animated GIFs to only animate once or none at all (PithHelmet does this also).

Plus a host of extensions and themes! Best of which is Adblock, which is not unlike PithHelmet, though I prefer Adblock to PithHelmet.

And perhaps a few others that I can't think of right now.

Sure, there might be a few quirks (getting less and less), but I can live with that given all the above. Participate in Bugzilla if and when you find any bugs to help improve the software!

Sorry, missed this one...

Not at all! Further, going back and forth sites that you've visited before is incredibly fast due to Firefox's efficient use of the RAM cache.

Safari has a stall when switching tabs?

I've been using Firefox on my PC for a while now. Love it, beats IE hands down.

Aside from it's speed and built in stuff such as tabbed browsing, pop up blocking and RSS, it's the extensions that really make it.

Adblock - ban ads from any site

Image zoom - zoom in and out of any image on a web page

Trasnslate - menu to translate the current page to english or several other languages

Autofill - the firefox version of the IE Google toolbar. It will fill in common info such as addresses and credit card info with a single click.


And the themes. You can make this thing look however you want it to. They can transform it, even changing the look of the menus.


It's great, and it's making real inroads on IE's dominance.

I've already successfully converted more than 10 people in total to Firefox both on Win and Mac!!!

I made my sister (who uses a PC) ditch IE and start using Firefox, I also made her ditch MSN Messenger in favor of Trillian.

'nuff said.

--B

how do you do that?

For a lot of configuration options: open a new tab and type "about:config" - without the quotes, of course.

I was going to point that out

1. Type "about:config" without inverted commas in the address bar. This will open up some of the advanced preference settings.

2. Type "pipe" without inverted commas to filter out the pipelining options. You should see three.

3. Set network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining both to true. The former enables pipelining for direct connections, the latter enables pipelining for proxy connections. Try increasing network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to 8 to increase the number of simultaneous requests (I think 8 is the maximum).

4. If you're on a personal machine, you might want to set browser.cache.disk_cache_ssl to true to allow caching of secure (HTTPS) pages, which is disabled by default for security reasons.

5. "about:cache" will allow you to browse your cache.

Other performance tuning options that you might want to have a look at http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=53650

Firefox's Adblock extension is invaluable and reason enough to ditch Safari.

It's great browsing the web with 99% of ads blocked, especially the annoying flash ads that can distract so much from reading a simple news story. If you don't like the default Firefox theme then try Noia Xtreme. Safari is a decent browser, but I like to call it the one-button mouse of browsers. No customization, feature-lacking, and dumbed down (ie not even showing you your download speed). The only reason I haven't tossed Safari in the trash is Apple stupidly put the operating system's default-browser setting in the Safari prefs.

Pitchhelmet does the same for Safari.

I never really bothered with Safari. Initially I preferred Camino (then Chimera). After I got tired of Camino's instability - I gave Safari another try - still too slow, and too buggy.

I began using FireFox on my PC at work while when it was still v0.8 and decided to give the Mac version a try. I haven't looked back since. It's faster than Safari and a hell of a lot more reliable. v1.0 is not quite on par with the PC version, there are a few minor things I hope Mozilla fixes for the MacOS-X v1.1 release such as integrating E-Mail into the "Tools" menu and better management of stored log-in/password information. The Mac version's password management has always been quirky - not being able to differentiate between subdirectories on a domain (ie - 2 different sets of log-in/passwords for 2 different areas of the same domain like a message board and webmail interface). The PC version has no problem with this and displays the proper log-in info, but the Mac version always defaults to the last log-in used for that domain - for example if I login to the webmail interface, the log-in name is the full e-mail address. If were to go back to the message board on the same website, the stored log-in name will now be the e-mail address used to check my email. The PC version of FireFox will display the proper log-in name for the message board and the proper log-in for the e-mail when I visit those respective pages.

Another odd thing is I am an admin of a phpBB forum at my site - If I go into a member's account to look at this info - the Mac version of FireFox automatically replaces the member's log-in name and password with mine. The PC version leaves the correct member information in the fields.

Yeah, but PithHelmet is an "all or nothing" blocker. Customizability is a pain (if you can). There are certain sites that I actually want the ads to show up on (yeah, I know, it sounds stupid), and others where the banners or whatever get clipped because of PithHelmet (although its a banner, not an ad).

Adblock lets you turn off stuff easily, you can see what's on the page and what links to what, so you can easily determine what needs to be blocked and how (of course, once you tell adblock to block "*.swf" there go 600,000 of the most annoying ads...)

Then again, I use Safari on my Mac most of the time. The only thing I miss out of Mozilla/Firefox is the ability to have multiple passwords for a web-site, and be able to pick which one to use. Keychain can't seem to handle this.

Well, hopefully this is something they'll 'fix' in v1.1, and actually put in preferences for many of these things, rather than assuming users know what they're supposed to be looking for (although some of their current preferences seem to lack that certain clarity that makes them understandable in terms of what they're going to do if you change them).

Many of these settings are advanced or experimental features that most users don't need to know about. Not many people enjoy being confronted with a preference panel with 101 options, so these are hidden away with a set of 'useful defaults' that only advanced users would tinker with.

Compare this with Safari with hardly any preference options at all!

I don't deny that there are some annoying bugs in Firefox, especially with the Mac version. But the cost/benefit ratio makes it worthwhile for me to use Firefox. Make it a point to visit http://bugzilla.mozilla.org to submit bugs or read how other people find work arounds. That's the spirit of open source!

Start by considering the point #1 when compating these two browser and you'll see that even at economic philosophy they differ as much as they do in real work.

Firefox is free; free as in free beer. Safari isn't. Some might say that it's downloadable for free, but only if you have a copy of OS X and an Apple computer to run the OS X on. So it isn't free; you already paid its price when you bought the OS and Computer. Firefox, on the other hand, is completely free, no matter what platform, computer, os OS you use. On top of that, Safari is a browser that is (mostly) the work of others; the KDE team and their Konqueror browser. Its just polished to be more aqua-like and its optimized for X.

Firefox is a built-from-scratch, stable, fast browser - Safari is a modification of an already-built browser, that does not entail any significant preference among KDE users (such as myself). Safari is a Konqueror wrapped in Aqua; Firefox is a newly built browser that is free, cross-platform and much, much more stable.

Just a few issues that I think set these two browsers apart.


p.s. I like Safari. So this is not a flame, nor an offence to those that use Safari or to those that think its better than Firefox.

It's absolutely not stable. Version 1 crashed on me several times already since I downloaded it a few days ago. Safari hardly crashes at all.

Firefox is indeed stable. Something's wrong with your setup.

Edit - ah crap look one post down.

Safari is wrapper for a rendering engine, KHTML. It is NOT a re-branding of Konqueror. And I'm pretty sure Firefox is just a wrapper for Gecko, another rendering engine.

The safari rendering engine, as well as being mostly kHTML (and therefore open source) has a fair chunk of Mozilla, both code and ideas, in it too, which makes this comparison less clear and less useful to my mind.

Also, I'm glad this thread didn't turn into the usual "mine is better" style argument, as if people don't have different needs and experiences with respect to browsers.

is there any way to have it import my bookmarks from safari?

Not directly. However, you can download a program called Safari Bookmark Exporter which will do the job for you.

There's also an extention that will allow you to sync your Firefox bookmarks with .Mac, so you can sync them to other computers (though not directly with Safari... still kept as seperate files).

In fact, my only serious complaint with Firefox is that it does not take advantage of the Keychain. Hopefully 1.1 will.

thanks for the tip

What is the build date of FF 1.0 ??

20041107 (yes, two days before the release on November 9).