When I upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.0 RC3 last week, there was a bug or issue that corrupted a cookie used by the fancy schmancy new authoring screens. Safari barfed all over that corrupt cookie, meaning I couldn't use it to manage my blog. Firefox just ignored it (and the functionality that required that cookie apparently degraded transparently - the widgets were no longer collapsable or movable).
So, I thought it would be a good chance to switch to Firefox 1.5 for a while and kick the tires a bit as my primary (only) browser.
Things I like about Firefox:
- Fancy schmancy wysiwyg and "ajax" crap all just works.
- Websites don't try to protect me from myself by warning me that I'm using Safari
- The del.icio.us extension makes creating bookmarks better (but not hugely better than the bookmarklet)
- The great "Web Developer" sidebar, with the cool stuff like cookie inspectors. Many of these tools are reproducable via bookmarklets, but it's nice to have a unified place to get them all.
Things I don't like so much:
- NO. SPEL. CHEKER. I tried installing the recommended extension, but it never worked. And wouldn't have been integrated with the OS-level dictionary I use in every other app on my Powerbook. It's really uncomfortable typing away, and not being able to know at a glance, or via peripheral vision, if I'd made a typo or a stupid spelling attempt (I rarely get words with more than 3 letters right on the first shot...)
- No Cocoa UI widgets - they're available in Camino, and are apparently planned for Firefox 3.0 (official plan), but the XUL widgets suck badly, compared to the great ones that are provided by Cocoa. Apparently, I'm not the only one who feels this way.
- Feels like it is quite a bit slower than Safari. Speed is good.
- Text rendering sucks badly as well. Compare pages to what they look like in Safari. Just simply not as good. And Firefox doesn't support the CSS dropshadow - meaning my blog's banner text looks worse in Firefox ;-)
- Page load progress indicator - the simple spinning "working..." indicator just ain't enough. There's an extension to get more info, including a progress thermometer, but nothing comes close to Safari's elegant thermometer-beneath-the-location-field implementation.