We're over the Mac look. The look it had was just fine. Matter of fact the Mac look is hard to see text through. The old look was light and easy to see. Lose the Mac look and I wish everyone, as is being stated more and more, would forget the passé Mac look and do your own thing.

Be as innovative as you are trying to be in the functionality of your app. If you copied how Mac Apps work, you'd still be in pre-Beta still.

The Mac look and feel is what's appealing to me (and others as well, I'm sure). Personally, aside from the constant security and reliability issues, the disjointed clusterf*%^& interface that is Windows ensures that I'll never consider it an option (on my home and studio machines at least).

More "Mac look" please.

I sure would like to try it out myself for a day, let alone a month. Weeks ago, I downloaded ß2, and after reading this article, I downloaded ß3 with the same result - it crashes on startup. It did slightly change the look of FF2, when I went back to it.

The new look could perhaps be improved (although I think it's an improvement, anyway), but honestly, people talk about the "look" too much. Interface design is not about looks. Mac-ish-ness is not about looks. It's about behavior. Menus in one application should behave the same way menus do in every other application. Text fields should behave the same way as everywhere else, unless there's a DAMNED GOOD reason for custom behavior (hint: there's not here).

The new beta looks more like other Mac apps, but it STILL doesn't act like other Mac apps! Try navigating sub-menus in your bookmarks bar or contextual menu. They look just like normal Mac menus now, but they act exactly like they used to. So what's the point?! Honestly, it was better when they looked different; at least then the appearance reflected the functionality.

Text fields are still non-standard as well.

The new beta looks great, but looks don't matter all that much. It's a sign of progress, though. I hope they take it further in the final release and make it behave like a normal Mac program, too.

Safari and iTunes don't have a Windows look when on that OS. In fact they struggle to maintain "the look" at all cost - despite the ugly menu embedded into the window because of a lack of menu bar. The thing about Firefox was that it used to look pretty much the same independent of OS. It was Firefox not MacFirefox and WinFirefox. This was appealing especially for people that move from office to home or from home to university/school because the browser looked and acted the same wherever you were - something that was not true if you used Safari at home and IE on Windows at work.

I think that Firefox should resist becoming a Windows generic and Mac generic program because this just paves the way for more differences and with it compatibility problems. Although I do hate the form buttons in Firefox on Mac.

I've been using OmniWeb as my browser for 4 years now. I even paid for it, and no, I don't work for OmniGroup.

This newest version of Firefox has made progress, but in terms of usability, it's still light years behind OmniWeb, even Safari. Importing bookmarks from OmniWeb was impossible, I had to do it manually. Firefox doesn't support drag and drop bookmark management, a basic feature in any modern browser.

It's a nice effort, but it's usability is still substandard.

Omniweb is a very nice browser. There are lots of useful features. For instance, built in support for ad and animation blocking. Also, I like being able to tell my browser to identify itself for certain sites as other browsers. That really is handy for a few sites I visit every once in a while (Safari can do this, but it is part of the bug menu, not a feature which is automatic). Omniweb also does tabs in a cool way.


With that said, every-time I tried to use Omniweb as my primary browser, I ended up switching back to Safari. My main grievance was the way it handled PDFs. For instance, I hate not being able to view PDFs in the browser itself. With Omniweb you cannot do that. The fault lies with Adobe for not making a plugin for the browser, but nonetheless, it still is too big a pain for me to be able to comfortably use the browser. There were some other more minor bugs as well. For instance, it's auto fill design isn't that good.

I never liked Firefox on the Mac. The new Firefox, however, (the beta version) has a lot of nice things to offer and acts much better. Moreover, contrary to your belief (maybe you mean from browser to browser), you can drag and drop both tabs and bookmarks in Firefox (this version anyway). Firefox, however, does have trouble rendering certain characters that Safari doesn't have problems with (for instance many Greek characters). I actually am using Firefox (the beta) full time because Safari's keychange and autofill performance is substandard compared to Firefox.

UPdate: I have not looked at Omniweb in a year. I stopped by today, and it appears they recently did release a PDF plugin. Maybe I will try it out again.

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Guest wrote:
I've been using OmniWeb as my browser for 4 years now. I even paid for it, and no, I don't work for OmniGroup. I also like the ability to change search engines, and the way it remembers common web sites.

In truth, I have at least temporarily switched to Firefox full time. Safari lately has been suffering some seriously annoying bugs. For instance, its auto fill support is very sporadic in what sites it wants to remember information from. Moreover, it flat out refuses to remember user names and passwords for many sites that Firefox will remember with no problem.

This newest version of Firefox has made progress, but in terms of usability, it's still light years behind OmniWeb, even Safari. Importing bookmarks from OmniWeb was impossible, I had to do it manually. Firefox doesn't support drag and drop bookmark management, a basic feature in any modern browser.

It's a nice effort, but it's usability is still substandard.

What I love about β3 is its zooming feature. It scale the the images pretty good as well. I cant compare the speed cuz it renders the site differently. (ie: a page that has lots of images)

I hope you guys understand my english. Haha.
Sorry...

Blu_xaphire

OmniWeb does render PDFs right in the browser now, yes. It's done so since the late 4.x versions. Even before that there was an open source freeware plug-in for Safari to render PDFs in the browser that also worked in OW.

Overall, OW is an under appreciated and under-rated browser. I do wish it had the specificity of cookie management that you get in FF, but you can still do it, albeit only after the cookie has been set. The default settings it works with though, which unfortunately you can't change, work pretty well. It at least makes it so you don't have to deal with the constant onslaught of dialog boxes asking you if you want to accept a cookie.