Firefox 3.0 has been out now for a short while and I have to say that it's pretty good. I made sure to install it onto my computer at work right away and of course there's no comparison to internet explorer which blows many-a-goat. However, it's taken me until tonight to upgrade to 3.0 on my macbook pro. I normally only use firefox on my MBP to check a certain bank account that does not recognize safari and insists upon firefox. Anyway, in the spirit of giving the new software a chance, I downloaded and installed which was a fairly painless process. It automatically helped me upgrade my piclens, and adblocker add-ons and migrated my old bookmarks seamlessly. So far it seems fast on the web, and I hear those old nasty memory leaks from 2.0 are gone (although I'll believe it when I see it), but I can't get over how ugly and wasteful the ui is.
I'm not sure where to start on this one. First thing that jumped out at me was the mismatching (in color AND gradient) bookmark toolbar. It's probably the same gradient as the bar above it, but it's compressed into a third in the Y direction and is visually jarring. Then there are the out of date round corners around all the buttons and input boxes. I mean, that was the kind of thing that was cool when 'skins' were all the rage. Just take a look at windows media player, so many curves and bulges it doesn't know where it's going. The font is also very sloppy. It's on the cusp of being too bold…or is it just fuzzy around the edges? I can't tell. Either way it's not too readable. But probably my biggest pet peeve of all time for any program anywhere, especially browsers, is wasted space. You can see in the screenshot that the fully expanded safari navigation, bookmark bar, and tabs take up less space than firefox in the default 'small icon' mode. Also, the aforementioned rounded buttons make for a lot of wasted space between them, and on top of that they're not even necessarily evenly spaced. Included in this space waster category is the tab bar, why are there gaps between tabs?! Okay, so maybe if I have one or two open and there is extra space can there be gaps, but if I have more tabs than will fit in the bar shouldn't the gaps go away? Nope. Apparently not.
Anyway, I can already hear you saying: "well the beauty about firefox is that you can make/install a custom 'theme' (read: skin), and make it look however you desire." …True. But if that's the case shouldn't the default theme be so bare bones, tiny, but still functional? And besides, I'd just look for a theme that makes it look like safari anyway.
I think I'll just stick to the real Safari for now.
edit: Anyone else notice that scrolling with two fingers on a MacBook Pro is sort of laggy? It's not instantly responsive unlike any other program I've used.
