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Anybody else wish Safari was more like Firefox? (sometimes)

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3-22

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 19, 2002
190
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I liked Safari a lot but then tried Firefox for OS X. (I used it on Windoze before.) Wow! Firefox is really nice on OS X. I really like the bookmark toolbar in Fireifox, it seems to behave more like you would expect when clicking. In Safari if you click a group by mistake you can't just scroll the mouse over to the correct one. You must click, click,click... I mean the menu bar in OS X does this but not the toolbar in Safari. The RSS and Smartlink feature is very cool too. Miss the spell checker though...

Anyway, just wondering what other people thought of Safari vs Firefox? Do many people use Firefox in conjuction with Safari? Or are most poeple happy with Safari?
 
have you tried camino? i'm sure you would also like that. i used to use safari all the time when i was on a nice fast 10Mbit per second connection at uni but then i went home to dial up and i really noticed how slow it is to display the page in comparison to others so i switched to camino as it is so cleam simple yest fast and powerful. the same goes for firefox i also like that but i use camino more.
 
I use safari and love it for it's syncing capabilities. My home and work bookmarks are always the same. When I add a bookmark at home iSync copies it to browser at work. What I wish it did have, though, is Firefox's ability to save your session upon quitting. I hate having to leave my computer on and my browser open in order not to lose the pages I was on.
 
I like tabbrowser extensions on Firefox/PC, but some of my favorite features seem to work inconsistently. For instance, I *looove* the option to restore multiple tabs on re-load. Well, it isn't that much of an issue on the Mac cuz I rarely shut down, but....

There are a couple things I'd like to see go the other way. Even with something like T.E. to get close icons on the tabs, they still don't seem to work right all the time. Sometimes you click on them and nothing happens. :( But it handles too many tabs for the screen width well - with the scroll wheel, and ditto on the way it handles the links toolbar.

I find that between Safari and Pithhelmet, too, that Safari does a better job at pop-up and ad blocking than FF does on my PC.
 
iLikeMyiMac said:
I wish Safari worked more like Firefox in the way that it handles gmail.
Firefox extensions aren't a bad feature either. ;)
Click to expand...

whats the difference between gmail on one or the other?? i didnt notice any :confused:
 
Make Safari compatible with everything. Make extensions.

iLife would be better.
 
Isn't spell check system wide? I do use Firefox on my PC. There is a spell check extension, but I rarely use it. I noticed they don't have an OS X spell checker extension (that I saw), but there a lot more than I thought there were. There are some things it does differently than IE (or Safari), but so far I like this version better than the last. I'm hoping the better it gets, the better Apple makes Safari. Like RSS coming in 2.0, with Tiger.
 
solvs said:
Isn't spell check system wide? I do use Firefox on my PC. There is a spell check extension, but I rarely use it. I noticed they don't have an OS X spell checker extension (that I saw), but there a lot more than I thought there were. There are some things it does differently than IE (or Safari), but so far I like this version better than the last. I'm hoping the better it gets, the better Apple makes Safari. Like RSS coming in 2.0, with Tiger.
Click to expand...

Spell check is definitely an option for textbox entry in Safari on Panther. It's under Edit->Spelling including a spell-as-you-type. It's just not activated on default.
 
mkrishnan said:
Spell check is definitely an option for textbox entry in Safari on Panther. It's under Edit->Spelling including a spell-as-you-type. It's just not activated on default.
Click to expand...
I always thought the spelling was a systemwide service too - why isn't it on the Services menu? If it was located there, any application could use it - including Firefox.
 
There's only 1 thing that I wish Safari had that firefox has.. the ability to auto-cope with unverified certificates. And maybe scrollable select-bars, but only if I could turn the damn things off.. the way they look offends my UI sensibilities, but they sure are useful when sorting through Enterprise lists of foo.
 
I like Safari because of how it looks. I think FireFox is just as fast as Safari, but I only use FireFox when I have to. I have to have a spell checker in my browser..... damn dyslexia.

I use FireFox on the PC all the time.
 
I don't like how you can't tab to drop down lists in Safari. It's kind of annoying when filling out forms with them cuz you have to stop typing to move the mouse, ya know. I also notice that some sites where you log on to accounts safari doesn't worked too well in. For instance, MTV's Battle of the Sexes online fantasy team. For some reason my trades wouldn't take, but took when I used IE.

Other than that, it's not bad. I use firefox on my PC and it's awesome, but it takes forever to start up.
 
Natalia81 said:
I don't like how you can't tab to drop down lists in Safari. It's kind of annoying when filling out forms with them cuz you have to stop typing to move the mouse, ya know.
Click to expand...

Actually, you can do this just fine. It's just that Safari respects your system-wide setting to do this. If you turn on full keyboard access system-wide, you can do this in every program including Safari. To turn on Full-Keyboard Access, do this:

Apple Menu > System Preferences. Click on the 'Keyboard and Mouse' icon.
Now click on 'Keyboard Shortcuts'. At the bottom of the window there is a checkbox 'Turn on Full Keyboard Access'. Check that, and you can now tab between buttons and popup menus in all apps. (including Safari)
 
thePurpleGiant said:
Apple Menu > System Preferences. Click on the 'Keyboard and Mouse' icon.
Now click on 'Keyboard Shortcuts'. At the bottom of the window there is a checkbox 'Turn on Full Keyboard Access'. Check that, and you can now tab between buttons and popup menus in all apps. (including Safari)
Click to expand...

Hmmm...Thanks! But when I tried this, it seems to have some focus issues. Like on the reply to thread page here, it'll tab to the combo boxes down below, like change notification type, but it won't tab to anything that's in this grey box where you type the message -- it goes right from the title textbox to the post icons radio buttons box below the editor. So it skips the font/size/combo boxes as well as all the text manipulation icons.

But nonetheless, I didn't realize there was a connection between that sys pref and this, so I'm going to give it a try and see if it does anything annoying in other programs. :)
 
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