Firefox

Well, I thought I’d download Firefox and try it out for a while (this entry is being written using it). The first thing I notice is it doesn’t look right. Read on if you don’t mind hearing criticisms of Firefox.

Now admittedly, the look is

a lot closer to a proper OS X application, but it’s still not right. The toolbar buttons are raised with a shadow, instead of being the flat Aqua toolbar buttons used everywhere else in OS X and mostly, the form controls in pages are ugly – I mean, really ugly. Think Motif look. Now admittedly, they are more standards compliant than Safari’s in that they support changing the font color, but it seriously doesn’t make up for how ugly they are. Combo boxes and buttons are the worst parts, but none of it has the right look for an OS X system. Ack! It doesn’t pick up my homepage from System Preferences, nor does it pick up the proxy settings. While this seems like something small – you set the proxy once and forget about it – people who travel between networks can no longer use Locations to change their proxy. On the plus side, the “Preferences” menu item is in the right place, so some attempt to make it fit into OS X has obviously been made. Using a sheet for the “About Firefox” is rather odd though – what does the about dialog have to do with the current window? It’s the same right across the application, so it should be a non-modal dialog. It’s a bit sad to see it doesn’t import bookmarks from Safari and appears to fail on importing IE favorites (none appear in the menu anyway despite having a number of favorites in IE). Not exactly critical though. There seems to be an interesting design difference between Firefox and Safari – Firefox will relayout the page every time another image is ready to be displayed. This is good in that the image is visible to the user as soon as possible, making it look like the page is loading quicker, but bad in that it distracts the user from the text that’s already displayed more often. In Safari, it seems to wait until a bunch of images are ready to be displayed before it lays out the page again, allowing the user to read the text with fewer distractions. For sites with lots of images, Firefox’s technique is clearly faster, for sites with textual content near the top of the page, Safari superiour. The Firefox tab pane is another dissappointing area for me – Tabs that aren’t in the foreground don’t look like tabs anymore. Instead of just dimming them or making them appear to be behind the frontmost tab, they actually change shape. This is particularly offputting when you first switch to the second tab – the first tab looks like it’s disappeared altogether leaving just the title of the web page painted on the toolbar without any tab in sight. Once you have more than two tabs the problem isn’t so bad because their is the right hand border on the first tab which makes it look at least a little like a tab. It’s a nice touch to use the proper “sprially thingy” on a tab while the page is loading, though it doesn’t quite render correctly when the tab isn’t the frontmost one. Nothing major though. On the down side, the close button for tabs is on the far right of the tab bar and completely disassociated with any tabs. This makes it non-obvious to find, leaves it with an ambiguous meaning as to what it’s actually going to close (one of the tabs, all of the tabs or the tab bar itself?) and most annoyingly means that the user must control-click on a tab then select close if they want to close it without bringing it to the front or click the tab then move the mouse all the way over to the close button. The great attrocity of Firefox though, is the preferences window.

1. It’s a sheet – why? It applies to the application as a whole, not the current window so it should be a non-modal dialog. Copying settings from the web page you’re reading is now much more difficult (as is blogging about the preview pane)
2. The tab bar down the side is a major “windozism”, on OS X we put the toolbar at the top (preferably giving the user the ability to rearrange the items on it as well).
3. The use of indented sections on the “General” tab makes it look extremely cluttered. What’s worse, the indented sections don’t actually group anything – there’s really only one option in each.
4. The privacy and advanced tabs are just a crime against humanity. It’s full of collapseable sections which seems like a really neat idea to save space, except that it buries the actual options under another layer of headings. As if that wasn’t bad enough, these collapseable sections are inside a scroll pane which not only scrolls vertically, but horizontally as well. It’s like salt in the wound when the scroll wheel doesn’t work. Finally, it only allows you to have one collapsable section open at a time, so as soon as you click on a new one, the previous one magically closes without being told to – they may as well have used nested tab panes (and we all know how evil that is right?) – oddly, the advanced pane will allow you to have multiple collapsable sections open at once.
5. The web features panel looks great, until you click on any of the buttons and then it manages to out do even the privacy pane. The buttons bring up secondary modal dialogs which open as sheets on the original browser window (again why?). As sheets of the non-modal prefences dialog that should have been used they would have worked well, but to appear as sheets of the browser window, the preferences window has to close first which is rather disconcerting for the user. Then when the secondary dialog is closed, it disappears and the preferences dialog has to open again. Since sheets animate this is a reasonably slow process – certainly long enough to get in the users way. If you want to see where this is really bad, click the “Add Site” button in the popup blocker section – now walk away from the computer, answer the phone or otherwise be distracted for 5-10mins. Come back and see if you can work out why there’s a sheet on your browser window prompting you to “Enter the site to unblock”.
6. What’s with using a hyperlink on the themes panel? I’ve seen quite a few applications do this and I just can’t see why it wouldn’t be a button instead. Hyperlinks are generally meaningful in the context of a web page, not in the middle of a dialog. This is particularly wierd since there’s a proper button next to the hyperlink which is effectively the opposite action. Why does one get a button and the other a hyperlink? The real killer for blog entries at least is that Firefox doesn’t suppor the builtin spell checking capabilities of OS X (I can’t believe anyone would create an application that doesn’t take advantage of this – it’s great functionality and it’s free!). Firefox does have some great features though – tabs (despite their UI), popup blocking, a heap of useful plugins, an excellent JavaScript debugger (particularly compared to the fail silently approach of Safari) and integrated Google searching. The trouble is, with the exception of the JavaScript debugger, all that’s in practically every browser except IE these days. Sadly, unless it comes up with some killer feature, I really can’t see how Firefox can compete with other browsers purely because it will always be playing catch up trying to emulate the OS X look and feel while the other browsers get it for free by using the real deal native components. One of these days I’ll work out what makes otherwise sane people decide it’s a good idea to reimplement the look and feel for an application instead of just adding a cross platform abstraction layer over native components – or better yet, customizing the GUI for each platform so that it does exactly what users expect. Fortunately, Camino brings a nice polished look to Mozilla on OS X but development on Camino has slowed dramatically and I’m beginning to wonder if it will ever reach 1.0. I guess in the end, Firefox would make a sensational browser on Linux and possibly even Windows, but on OS X it look out of place and just doesn’t have a polished enough GUI to compete with the wealth of other browser options.