Wednesday, 15 February 2006

Christian: Firefox on OS X: a unified experience
Update: There is now an official GrApple theme for Uno available at www.takebacktheweb.org! Thanks to Aronnax.

Last September, I posted a screenshot of a unified Firefox theme; at the time, I didn't make it available for downloading, since it was little more than a modification of the GrApple themes, and nobody likes a fink who steals. Since then:

  1. Iridium was repackaged by a different author as Uno. Uno brings the Unified window appearance to practically all applications. Why Apple themselves haven't done this is a topic of considerable discussion.
  2. The Iridium theme author, Steven, posted a link to my weblog post, which I didn't notice until today (I knew that not doing Trackbacks would come back and bite me eventually). This prompted several posters to ask (some in less-than-friendly ways, since deleted), "Where's the download link?"
  3. The GrApple themes have been tweaked and updated, and are looking better than ever.
  4. In the wake of the release of Camino 1.0, a number of commentators (Mike Davidson and Jon Hicks, most notably) have taken to complaining that Firefox doesn't "feel and behave" like a true Mac application.

I'm receptive to cries that Firefox isn't, at first glance, very Mac-like, and I'm as picky about interface design as anybody. That said, Firefox can, indeed, be made to behave more like a "true" Mac browser. Here's how:

My Firefox toolbar

The Unified Look: The unified window look involves a combination of either Uno or Iridium, one of the GrApple themes (in this case, Eos), and potentially a bit of manual hacking. Uno claims to unify Firefox; in reality, all it is doing is putting this toolbar-bg.png file into the Chrome folder of your Firefox profile (more about that here) and adding the following bit of code to your userChrome.css file:

menubar, toolbox, toolbar {
background: url("toolbar-bg.png") repeat-x !important;
}

There's an additional caveat: I've found that some of the GrApple themes put a 1px border above the titlebar (where the traffic light buttons are) and the Firefox toolbar (the back/forward buttons, etc.). To get rid of that, you'll need to add the following bolded line to the code above:

menubar, toolbox, toolbar {
border-top: 0px !important;
background: url("toolbar-bg.png") repeat-x !important;
}

Adding this code to your userChrome.css file, together with a GrApple theme, should give you the unified appearance in Firefox. Note that I've only tested this with Uno, not Iridium.

(Note that if you use the official GrApple Uno theme, which was released after I wrote these instructions, you don't need to do any of the above.)

Aqua widgets: Firefox can also be made to use the Mac OS X standard Aqua widgets. There is a custom version of Firefox built by Neil Lee that uses the standard OS X widgets instead of Firefox's uglier widgets. There are at least two downsides to this, however:

  1. It's an unofficial build. This means that it can't use the official Firefox name or icons by default. This is a policy that the Mozilla Foundation has to supposedly preserve its branding. I find the policy a bit silly, but I don't write the software, so I don't set the rules.
  2. The widgets don't always look perfect. Especially on web pages with small fonts, form buttons may look funny. This will supposedly be fixed when Firefox officially uses Cocoa code in a forthcoming version. I'd ever-so-gently remind the MoFo that Mac users were promised OS X zen for FF 1.0, FF 1.5, and FF 1.5.0.1. Still waiting...

Native feed handling: By default, clicking on the feed icon in the Firefox toolbar only adds a live bookmark in Firefox. If you prefer to use a different feed reader, this isn't particularly helpful. In Safari, clicking the feed icon adds that page's feed to the feed reader of your choice (in my case, NewsFire). Firefox can do the same by using the LiveLines extension and its ability to pass feeds through the feed:// protocol. Now when you click the feed icon, the feed should be piped through to your chosen feed reader.

A close button on every tab: This mimicks how Safari handles tabs, and is done using the Tab X extension.

Batteries not included: There are still gaps in Firefox's Mac-likeness. The most frequent one I hear of is that Firefox doesn't use the Mac's built-in spell-checking in web forms, as WebKit browsers (Safari, Shiira, etc.) do. Another complaint is thta Firefox doesn't tie-in with the Services menu.

It remains the case that Firefox isn't a perfect Mac application; however, in a world of 95+ Mac browsers, Firefox remains my weapon of choice.
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