Firefox tryout
April 20, 2006 at 10:44 PM by Dr. Drang
I’m giving Firefox another tryout. It was my main browser on Linux almost from the time it came out, and I’ve always used it on Windows when I’ve had a choice. I’ve never given it more than a few minutes of trial on the Mac—mainly because its startup time was always much longer than Safari’s and its advantages over Safari aren’t as great as its advantages over IE—but there’s a relatively new version out, and the attraction of its many extensions (especially Greasemonkey) is strong, so I’m going to stick with it for a week or two and see if it works for me.
I’ve installed a couple of Greasemonkey scripts that fix usability problems with Bloglines:
- the focus always seems to revert to the left pane when I’d rather it stay in the right pane, and
- clicking on links opens up a new window instead of a new pane.
These have already made the Bloglines experience more pleasant.
I’ve also installed the wonderful CSkinner, which lets me override the CSS of a given page or site. This is particularly good for those sites that use fonts too tiny or with too little contrast for my mid-40s eyes.
It’s also nice to have a search bar that can search sites other than Google. I’ve loaded up Wikipedia, A9, del.icio.us, IMDB, weather.com, and Webster. The full list of search engines is here.
