So I was all excited yesterday that Mozilla 1.3 was final, and I installed it at work. Love it. Couldn’t wait to upgrade at home, which I did just a bit ago.
I can’t help but think that the MacOS X build of 1.3 has some problems. I don’t mind that the splash screen is strangely absent (though it makes me wonder if it’s even starting at all), but it seems weird that the ability to install new themes is totally broken. Now, since I hate both the default “Modern” theme as well as the crusty old “Classic” theme, this is a huge issue for me. I don’t run OS X so that my browser can piss me off by looking stupid, or old and ugly (the latter specfically annoys me).
Too bad I uninstalled my existing themes, thinking that I might have to reinstall them, since it means I just lost the cool Aqua theme, which probably got cease-and-desisted out of existance by Apple’s legal department. Which is a shame, because it makes Mozilla look faily nice, and integrates nicely with the OS X Aqua “look,” which I am quite fond of. It’s probably the only Mozilla theme that doesn’t look dumb on a Mac. I don’t want my browser to look like Windows XP, or IE, and I don’t want my browser to look like a Gnome/KDE wars refugee. I want it to look like it belongs on a Mac. It needs to be sexy!
I would really like Safari, except that there are no tabs, the cookie management is totally inferior to Mozilla, and it has some pretty serious cookie and rendering engine bugs. I almost like Camino (formerly Chimera) enough to use it, but it doesn’t have quite as much dominion over cookies as Mozilla does. And I’m not using IE; you can’t make me.
So, I downgraded to Mozilla 1.2.1, and started looking for a suitable theme to keep me from being totally morose over my loss of AquaMoz. Finally, I think I found a reasonable substitute in this one, PimpZilla. (Sorry for the PDF vs. a more traditional image format — it’s what OS X saves its screen captures as.)
I have to say… I think I could get used to this. The leopard skin and shag look definitely fits for a web browser! 
- Mood:devious
- Music:This Mortal Coil - “Dreams Made Flesh”
4 responses so far ↓
Safari has tabs now. Of course, it probably still has render bugs.
Sure, it has tabs if you happen to work at 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino, but that leaves the rest of us out in the cold!
I’ve been playing with some CSS2 stuff this week, and am really amazed by how badly it mangles some positioning things. Almost as bad (sometimes worse than) IE!
And the cookie handling is soooooo buggy. (Mostly this bothers me because none of my sites work with it, even when the browser is set to ‘accept all cookies’.)
I want Safari to rock. I want Apple to have a powerful suite of awesome apps. But why couldn’t they work their magic on a much more solid browser like Mozilla? Moz could really use their talents to improve its performance and make it feel more like a Mac app, and Apple wouldn’t be starting with such a piss-poor user experience!
Oh well, I guess nobody asked me.
What, an HTML jockey like you can’t hack one tiny little XML .plist?
Yeah, maybe they should have used Mozilla, but the whole Mozilla “platform independence” thing kind of sucks the performance out of it. Then there’s the whole “2.5 years ago when we wanted to make a browser, Mozilla code sucked balls” argument that the Mac Safari guys said.
Then again, it’s only v.64, back when Mozilla was in 0 digits, it was shitty as hell.
Yeah, but if I was Steve Jobs, I wouldn’t let it go to public beta if it can’t sign on to Amazon.com. Or buy stuff at ThinkGeek.com. Or sign on to many online banking sites. It just smells of being rushed out the door. I was really hoping that, being from Apple, it would be insanely better than everything else, hands down. And it isn’t. Until it is, I probably won’t use it, except to faithfully test out each new beta in the hopes of spotting improvements.
YMMV.