[sdf]

I really think this article is horribly slanted. I've given Firefox a try, and it is still bush leagues at best on the Mac. There are just a million small but annoying problems with it, and these problems are not accepted as defects.

[salmonstk]

I like Firefox. I just can't make the Switch out of loyalty to Apple.

[griffman]

"As noted, it does not support Services"
In my mind, though I didn't cover this in the article, that's a positive. The Services menu is the most overblown piece of bloat in OS X, and something needs to be done about it. My services menu currently has nearly 100 top-level items, and probably 300 or more items in total, counting all the submenus. Until Apple comes out with a Services Menu manager, I'll never even try to use the thing again.
But if you're going to pick on Firefox for not supporting the Services menu, make sure you also pick on the following applications: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Entourage, Photoshop Elements, Photoshop, Motion (and probably Final Cut Express, Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, etc.), Acrobat, and probably 100 other programs I can list. The truth is, with a few exceptions like BBEdit, very few non-Cocoa programmers have taken the time to support Services. And given how few people I know who use the menu at all, I don't forsee this changing anytime soon.
"As noted, it asks for a download decision each time, though its all been set in Preferences"
As I noted, this is no longer true. I haven't been asked for a save location since I set a download location in the prefs.
"The Page Up/Page Down keys dont work"
Huh? They work just fine here, on two machines. Can you give me a URL where they don't work for you?
"Open source apps download as .exe files"
URL please? I download probably 20 open source apps a month with Firefox, and I've never seen that (not even in 1.0.7).
"Its Form Fill is laughable"
I agree, and offered some solutions above. But it's still a weak point.
I completely disagree that Firefox is a sorry addition to the Mac world. There are simply no other browsers out there that offer the flexibility provided by Firefox. For that reason alone, I'll put up with a few non-Mac-like interface elements. But that's the beauty of this world -- we don't all have to agree on the same browser, and I use three in my regular rotation -- Firefox does most of the heavy lifting, I use Safari if I know I need to do some heavy forms work, and I use OmniWeb when I want the nicest UI on my browsing.
-rob.

[griffman]

"I really think this article is horribly slanted. I've given Firefox a try, and it is still bush leagues at best on the Mac. There are just a million small but annoying problems with it, and these problems are not accepted as defects. "
Slanted? It's a review of the new features in 1.5, compared to 1.0.7, and one small section talking about speed where I directly compared it with Safari. How can that be slanted? This wasn't an editorial about "What's the best browser for the Mac;" that clearly would've been more slanted towards whatever browser was being recommended. The strongest thing I wrote was "And if youve never tried Firefox before, nows a great time." Hardly the stuff 60 Minutes is made of /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif.
The full-blown review, which my article is not (notice there's no mouse rating, nor any discusson on alternatives, etc.), will discuss the pros and cons of Firefox 1.5. I was simply discussing its new features and usability, and gave an example of one area where I feel Firefox 1.5 has a nice speed edge over Safari. That's it.
Both browsers are wicked fast, render pages very, very well, and have nice feature sets. Which to use is really a user-level choice now, and it's just nice to have that choice available. I choose Firefox, due to its speed, themability, and extensibility. Others choose Safari for its speed, base feature set, and Mac-like interface.
-rob.

[jmincey]

"...and I use three in my regular rotation..."
Rob, imagine if we all could say this in regard not only to web browsers but also to e-mail, instant messaging, word processing, image editing, audio, etc. The unfortunate fact is that many people can say this in regard to these other genres of software, (myself included) -- but doesn't this point out a problem in the software industry?
I'm sure there will always be trade-offs and pros and cons with different software packages, (in other words, there will never be a cure-all application); but I surely hope it won't be long before we can each -- based on our own priorities and criteria -- settle on a single application per genre and not have to do a tap dance from app to app.
I have to leave Safari for Firefox when I want to visit certain web sites, but then I have to use Safari (rather than Firefox) for other web-related functions. For one IMAP mail account I still use the evil Eudora while for others I use Thunderbird and also Apple's Mail. For some image editing tasks I use Adobe's Photo Elements while for others I use GraphicsConverter or iPhoto -- or the venerable monster of Photoshop. And so it goes for 2D vector graphics as well -- I use a number of different packages for different kinds of tasks.
If you think it's bad in regard to the major software categories, it only gets worse in the utility area -- such as in regard to FTP, file sharing, network tools, UNIX shells, XHTML code generators, and on and on I could go with examples.
Where does this stop?
I can see why long ago Apple was moving in the direction of a virtual document with component-ware and the Open Doc technology -- the most promising technology that Apple ever abandoned, (in what is quite a long list).
Anyway, it seems to me that web browser development should be mature enough by now as to not make it necessary for users to flip-flop from one product to the other to the other -- depending on whether we are performing online banking, streaming audio/video, e-commerce, online surveys, or just reading news articles, etc. I don't expect any single product to be all things to all people, but neither do I want the other extreme of this game of software musical chairs.
Of course, plug-in technology (such as what we have with Firefox) is supposed to be the next best thing to Open Doc -- so we have SOME modularity at least. And yet even then, a number of people find Firefox lacking, even as Safari is lacking in some key respects and even indeed as ALL web browsers are still lacking in providing fundamental functions to the user.
So when can we expect to have a mature, standards-compliant, full-featured (and yet stable and fast) browser -- to say nothing of a full assortment of them to choose from?

[stork55]

Still waiting for someone to come up with a solution to dealing with Active-X control. There are a growing number of web based applications, and web sites that simply don't work on Mac because they require Active-X controls. Until then, not impressed with Firefox. Tried 1.5 already...Feh. Long way to go from the ease, intuitiveness and flexibility of Safari for my liking.
The ActiveX thing is big especially in the banking and healthcare sectors. Microsoft has turned the internet into the interknot with ActiveX. What used to be a platform independant arena whereby open, transparent and instant communication could faciliitate conducting all kinds of transactions has become a webbed knot in which we have become trapped by Microsoft code....down came the spider! We need an open source solution to Active X now!
Cheers.

[jmincey]

"The ActiveX thing is big especially in the banking and healthcare sectors."
I don't know about health care but I find that banks I transact with increasingly are moving away from ActiveX because of security concerns and its lock-in to a single platform. Even many Windows users are disabling ActiveX controls in their browser of choice. Thus I'm surprised to see this comment on your part. Your experience is clearly different from mine in this regard.
I'm seeing more use of AJAX, Java, php, etc, in lieu of ActiveX.

In reply to:

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There are a growing number of web based applications, and web sites that simply don't work on Mac because they require Active-X controls.

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Then your gripe is with the web developers who thumb their nose at platform independence and standards in favor of a Microsoft-proprietary technology. The best Apple and Mozilla can do is stay compliant with w3c conventions.
I'm not sure I want web browsers to chase after every change Microsoft makes; this cedes power to Microsoft then as the standard bearer and if we go too far down that road we can kiss goodbye consumer choice in the browser market.
Browsers like Firefox, Omniweb, Opera, Konqueror, and others are alive because of their steadfast adherence to standards and their open approach to the web. Chasing after Microsoft (or web developers who use only Microsoft technololgies) is a losing proposition for them.

[consumer_x]

Hello
The first thing that is used in the article as an example of good change is the tabbed interface for history, cache, passwords, et al. For me, this is a horrid change. Now, instead of just clicking "clear" down the page for all the caches I will need to click a tab, then "clear" for each. This new feature is less usable to me, and I prefer all caches to be emptied in a single pane.
This is actually a change that makes me rethink upgrading to 1.5 .
cheers!

[jmincey]

In reply to:

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Now, instead of just clicking "clear" down the page for all the caches I will need to click a tab, then "clear" for each.

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Not true. Look at the "Cache" tab and click on "Settings." You will see that you have the option here to clear everything at once if you choose to do so. As a result, you have the best of both worlds -- granularity if you want it and yet also the ability to clear everything out at once.

[lkrupp]

The main reason I don't use Firefox is Java. Safari works the best when dealing with Java applets and especially those that require LiveConnect. LiveConnect is the technology that allows Java and Javscript to communicate. My bank uses a Java based application called ViewOne to view/print canceled checks online. Safari is the only Mac browser that works with my bank. Firefox results in "Session Timed Out" error messages.
Firefox has the look and feel of Classic Mac OS. It doesn't feel OS X to me, doesn't support Services.
Compatibility is number one with me and Safari gets more compatible with every update. I can't remember the last time I had to launch Firefox in order to view a web page. Speed is of secondary importance in my opinion.

[Mr_Morden]

What the heck happened to contextual menus? Nearly everything I ever used Firefox for involved them. I spent quite a bit of time looking for regular menu equivalents, but no luck. Also, in the preferences window, I clicked on the "Clear History" button under the History tab and was treated to the dreaded spinning beachball for ten minutes or so until I got fed up and Force Quitted the stupid thing, so I see the preferences panel is not improved whatsoever. Overall, 1.5 seems completely useless to me, so to hell with it.

[jmincey]

"The main reason I don't use Firefox is Java."
You might try Java Embedding Plugin. The developer offers this description: "The Java Embedding Plugin allows other web browsers than Apple's Safari to use the most recent versions of Java (1.4.X) on Mac OS X."
Firefox may then work much better on Java sites.

[guzzisport]

I'm a pretty primitive user. I don't use tabs, don't care a whit for contextual menus and so forth. Perhaps I'm a system 7.5.3 Luddite or something. That said, anything later than FireFox 1.0.7 immediately crashes on my G5 2x2. Worse, I use a high latency satellite link because I'm out in the boonies. Because of that, I've had to tweak the settings quite a bit to get even modest response. Even with those changes, FireFox frequently requires a manual refresh for each and every image in a web page. Tedious. Netscape 7 works a bit better and I suppose I should go back to that as my primary browser but I'm enamored of the translate extension I have in FireFox. That almost makes it worth the effort. Either way, I'm not going to touch IE with a stick. I hate that interface worse than I do taxes. For now, it's FireFox 1.0.7 and probably wait for 2.0.

[JMStafford]

In reply to:

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I don't know about health care but I find that banks I transact with increasingly are moving away from ActiveX because of security concerns and its lock-in to a single platform. Even many Windows users are disabling ActiveX controls in their browser of choice. Thus I'm surprised to see this comment on your part. Your experience is clearly different from mine in this regard.

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I had a friend who started a medical practice for her father last year (he split from his old partnership to go solo). I tried to convince her to buy Macs, but the medical practice software on the Mac wasn't up-to-snuff (it's good for the technically oriented, but not for people who need hand holding). I tried to get her to use Firefox over IE, but the software in question requires ActiveX and thus IE. sigh
As for my browser choice, I use Safari most of all. My second choice is Mozilla. Then Internet Explorer (I use this for anonymous browsing since it has none of my stored user names or passwords). Then Firefox. I also have Camino, Netscape, and Opera loaded. In my dock I also keep icons for the Windows versions (through Virtual PC) loaded for testing purposes.