AFP548 is report­ing a bug with Fire­fox 3 where appar­ently it doesn’t work with Macs that are set up to use a net­worked home directory.

When I updated to Fire­fox 3, I imme­di­ately noticed that Book­marks were not vis­i­ble under book­marks menu. The Search engine field had a generic icon and when I selected ‘Manage Search Engines’, the dialog box was frozen and I couldn’t get out of it with­out quit­ting Fire­fox. When I tried to enter a URL into the URL field and press ‘enter’, noth­ing hap­pens. How­ever, when double-​click on a URL in an e-mail mes­sage, that appears to work. […] When I switched to a local admin account (i.e., Fire­fox pro­file on the local hard drive), it seems to work fine. How­ever, when I switch back to my net­work home account (on our XServe), it still dis­plays the prob­lems described above. I tried other user accounts on our XServe with the same problems.

This is kind of unbe­liev­able to me that Fire­fox 3 was released with such a show-​stopping bug on the Mac side. I’m pretty sure that most com­pa­nies that use Macs use them with net­worked home direc­to­ries (at least in the Aca­d­e­mic world). It’s good to know though before I start adding Fire­fox to the images for fall semester.

Appar­ently this is a doc­u­mented bug and as a com­menter sug­gested, will be fixed in the future. You can read the bug track in Bugzilla to see how the fix is progressing.

Mozilla’s Alex Faaborg announced a week or so ago that Fire­fox 3 would focus on visu­ally inte­grat­ing with the oper­at­ing system:

Visual inte­gra­tion with Win­dows and OS X is our pri­mary objec­tive for the Fire­fox 3 refresh.

This is great news for Fire­fox, because as I have men­tioned before, its user inter­face has really been the achilles’ heel of the browser, espe­cially on the Mac.

Mozilla’s user expe­ri­ence team lit­er­ally wants to do a better job of visu­ally inte­grat­ing with Win­dows than IE, and a better job of visu­ally inte­grat­ing with OS X than Safari. I don’t know if we will be able to pull that off, but that’s the goal.

I’m glad that they’ve rec­og­nized this as an issue and I can’t wait to see what they come up with. If Fire­fox actu­ally did look as good or better than Safari on a Mac, I might use it as my pri­mary browser.

Via Beauty And The Geek: Fire­fox 3’s Visual Makeover.

Khaled Abou Alfa has a nice sum­mary of how the font ren­der­ing looks on the dif­fer­ent browsers (I believe this is all on Windows):

• Font Ren­der­ing

The way that Fire­fox ren­ders text on Win­dows is embar­rass­ing. It just looks ter­ri­ble. Using Alfa’s exam­ple, here is what the text looks like in Firefox:

Ouch. It hurts my eyes.

Yes­ter­day I blogged about the nifty little Open in Fire­fox script that I made. As it turns out, there is an even better way to this, using some fancy Quick­sil­ver magic.

• Another Quick­sil­ver Tuto­r­ial: Gold Trig­ger

By using Proxy Objects in Quick­sil­ver, you can gain access to the Current Web Page object. After making sure that you have acti­vated the Open URL With... action in the Quick­sil­ver pref­er­ences you are free to spec­ify Fire­fox (or another browser).

Current Web Page → Open URL With... → Firefox

Once you have this work­ing, you can set it up as a custom trig­ger. I set mine to the F1 key. Even better, this trig­ger is much more extend­able than the script. You might not nec­es­sar­ily always want to open a URL in Fire­fox. Say you want to open a page in Opera. Just create another trig­ger, but leave out the item in the third pane.

Current Web Page → Open URL With... → "Leave this blank"

Now when you use that trig­ger, acti­vate it with a hotkey (I used F2) and type in the first few let­ters of the browser (or pro­gram) you want the URL to open in.

I cur­rently use Safari as my pri­mary browser on OS X sys­tems. Often­times I find that I either want to dis­sect a web page in Fire­bug or even just see what it looks like in Fire­fox. This is kind of a pain because it takes sev­eral steps:

1. Open Fire­fox (one step with Quick­sil­ver)
2. Acti­vate Safari
3. Copy URL from desired website
4. Acti­vate Firefox
5. Paste URL into Firefox.

I could prob­a­bly con­sol­i­date these steps a little bit (by drag­ging and drop­ping the URL per­haps), but the point remains, this is an annoy­ing process to go through every time I want to quickly check some­thing out in Firefox.

Last week I put together a nifty little script in Automa­tor to stream­line this process. Basi­cally, the script copies the URL from the active tab in Safari, opens Fire­fox and loads the page. I saved the script as an appli­ca­tion and with Quick­sil­ver it’s now just one step to acti­vate the script.

• Open in Fire­fox Script (ZIP)

For the most part, the script was pretty easy to set up. There is a built-​in action to Get Current Webpage from Safari. There aren’t any script­able actions for Fire­fox from Automa­tor, but open­ing it is simple enough using a ter­mi­nal command:

open -a Firefox.app

The only slightly tricky part about the script was get­ting the copied URL to auto­mat­i­cally load when Fire­fox opens. After a little research I found that this could be simply passed as a para­me­ter to the open command:

open -a Firefox.app $@

Per­haps some other Safari-​lovers will find this useful. Enjoy.