The Cult of the Cool Mac: Made with 100% USDA real meat!

A few small problems popped up in the move to Firefox 2.0.

I used the Nightly Tester Tools extension -- ur... I mean "Add-on" (new nomenclature) -- to make all of my extensions compatible and was immediately struck by problems with two ext... Add-ons.

Tab Mix Plus needed an update, without which I got weird visual artifacts. Why keep Tab Mix Plus when Firefox has new tab-controls? Because Tab Mix Plus is better. It offers a kajillion ways to customize the look and feel of tabs (the default is ugly -- start customizing it by getting rid of the progress bars). A quick update to the latest beta of Tab Mix Plus and some tweaking got my tabs just the way I like them.

Spellbound also gave me some trouble. Apparently, I am one of the rare people who managed to keep it running the last couple of years. I wanted to keep it because I didn't trust Firefox 2.0's spell-checker. I forgot that Spellbound needs its dictionary file to be placed in a "dictionaries" folder inside the MacOS folder hidden inside of Firefox's application package so it took some time to work out why it was nonfunctional in Firefox 2.0.

It turns out that it was worth the trouble to get Spellbound running because the native spell checker stopped working the second time that I ran the program. Putting a second copy of the dictionaries folder inside of the user profile folder at ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/ fixed that.

BTW: You can download dictionaries here. Option-click to download a dictionary instead of installing it. Rename the file so that it ends in .zip and you should be able to decompress it as a zip file from the Finder in Mac OS 10.3 or later.

Whew! What a lot of work to get that thing running.

But wait!! Now I can't scale text by holding down the Command key and scrolling up or down with my mouse's scroll wheel! What happened? Oh! It has been remapped to the Control key. I can live with that.

And when I use the Tab key to navigate a web site, it jumps to every object on the page rather than moving between text fields! Okay, so I enter about:config in the address field in the toolbar and with a little searching I find that the entry for accessibility.tabfocus no longer exists. So I add the entry in about:config and give it an integer value of 1 and Voila! Tabbing works as it should. (Why oh why don't they put stuff like this in the preferences?!)

...and why the heck is Firefox telling me that this web site is a web forgery? Ah... that new preference to tell me when a site is a "suspected forgery" is turned on by default and it's giving a false-positive. So that "feature" needs to be disabled.

...and marvelously, except for the icons in the toolbar being a little different, the experience is almost identical to Firefox 1.5. It's just as fast as 1.5 was. Except for the inline spell checker and the fact that it blocks popups from a few more sites than 1.5 did, it feels pretty much the same.

It was royal pain to set it up just right, but it feels like a solid browser... now that I've tweaked it. The inline spell checker is a nice improvement. I think it was worth my efforts to upgrade. I assume that folks without the burden of all of my customizations will have an easier time making the move.

...

Here's an interesting postscript: Firefox 2.0 does NOT fix two bugs that have plagued Firefox since its introduction on the Mac. Sometimes after switching between applications, Firefox won't let me enter text in text fields until I've switched to the Finder and back again. And for no particular reason, Firefox will refuse to follow links to encrypted/https sites until it has been quit and re-launched.

So basically, 2.0 adds almost nothing to the browsing experience except the spell checker, some tabbing features that are done better in Tab Mix Plus and a malfunctioning phishing warning. They didn't even fix some of the oldest bugs in the browser. Not much of an update for a 2.0 release, is it?