RSTY

As a Mac user, Firefox has never been great on Mac OS X. It is well known that native apps to the host OS always win based on speed and looks alone, and this, so far, has been true. I’ve used Safari since I first started out on Mac in 2003. Firefox, by contrast, has always looked out of place and old compared to Safari with its brushed aluminium and aqua elements.

Firefox 2 - an old, out of place look

Firefox 3, however, has fixed this issue for Mac users. It now sports a great looking skin and has aqua-like elements too. I note that it is still not a native cocoa implementation, but it’s close enough. It’s also much, much faster - one of my gripes with Firefox 2 was that not only did it have Windows-like form elements, but it was very sluggish - and my Macbook is by no means lacking in grunt. Mozilla have clearly put a lot of work into memory management, and the developers are claming that it is twice as fast as Firefox 2. I can believe them on that.

Check out how Firefox 3 looks -

 On the left you can see the default Firefox 3 Mac theme, and on the right is a gorgeous Safari-like theme called Grapple. You can clearly see the Aqua-like elements on the Google home page.

But it doesn’t end with how the app itself looks - we have some really nice features under the hood too. The bookmarking and history engine has been rewritten to use the SQLite3 engine which makes for some interesting development possibilities. You could quite easily interface other installed apps to use data from the database - I’m looking forward to some nifty gadgets and mashups based on this change.

The Mozilla team have also completed updated the add-ons control, centralising it into a single “add ons” form which deals with extensions, themes and plugins. The downloads window is now searchable, and makes it a tonne easier to find files you’ve downloaded compared to Firefox 2.

I’m actually going to move away from Safari to Firefox - and I couldn’t be happier. Roll on release candidates and a final 3.0!