Firefox for Mac? Works for Me.

It was with skepticism that I first used Firefox -- a similar skepticism to when I first used Safari -- because my experience with third-party Web browsers for years has been that it doesn't feel like they really work. The Mac's third-party offerings have always had something enticing about them -- iCab, Mozilla, Omnipage, Opera -- but I would also gravite back to Internet Explorer, because it offered fewer hiccups, even if it was slower.

Then came Safari. Written and published by Apple, it seemed like Safari stayed on top of things better than any "non-IE" browser since IE had taken the crown from Netscape. Since somewhere around Mac OS X 10.2, I haven't looked back.

Now there's Firefox. And it's the first time I've been to a true third-party browser that I felt I was likely to stick with. I was reading this Your Tech Weblog entry the other day and shaking my head -- so far, I feel that Firefox is quite a bit faster than Safari in my day-to-day use. It is slightly more crashprone (every once in a while the interface seems to give up and quit responding to mouse movements) and I've not yet utterly tested it with multimedia plug-ins and so on. But there seems to be enough of a groundswell around the product that I think it'll be a player and get the attention it needs so that those plug-in type things work.

I'm also impressed at the Mac-like feel of the browser; even though it's a crossplatform application, the Mac version seems to use Mac interface items very nicely, and I rarely feel like I'm in an app that's not a ground-up Mac app. (As far as I know it is -- I haven't really studied the way the different platforms were versioned and coded.)

That Your Tech Weblog entry did have one fun clue that I've taken advantage of -- apparently Firefox has been built into a few different versions that are specifically optimized for the G4, instead of the G5. Those versions can be found at http://homepage.mac.com/krmathis/ -- I've installed one and so far I'm pleased with the performance on my PowerBook G4/500 -- it feels faster than Safari.

One thing I've grown to like about Firefox I've never used in other apps -- a tabbed interface. I guess the default [cmd]+click opens into tabs (instead of new windows), which is what got me to switch. In a way it's like going from Classic Finder to Finder windows in Mac OS X. Tabs make a lot more sense than a mess of windows under almost any circumstances.

So FireFox has grabbed a coveted spot on my Dock and home and on my PowerBook, and I've even switched it to the default browser. We'll see how long that lasts -- from what I've read on Apple's site, I might switch back to Safari for the RSS reader that's coming in Tiger, or maybe Camino...which is downloading in the background as a write this...will be worth a look.