Firefox 3 for the Mac

I tried Firefox 3 on Windows and I liked it there, but on the Mac? Bleah. It looks like a bad knockoff of Safari but without the attention to detail that signifies Apple products. A lot of the icons are ugly, and off by just a pixel here or there. You’d think one pixel wouldn’t make that much difference but it does. Plus I actually preferred the traditional Firefox 2 chrome to the Safari style brushed metal widgets.

Plus it’s perceptually much slower than Firefox 2. I’m a 20 WPM typist at best and I’m typing faster than Firefox can enter text into this form. The characters are several words behind where I’m typing about half the time.

Firefox 3 was supposed to only remember passwords after you’d successfully logged in, but on Mozilla’s own Add-Ons site, that’s not working. It asked me to remember a failed password.

Always Remember Password no longer works, but these instructions I found on the Web might:

Always remember password hack for Firefox 3

If you’re on Firefox 3 you can just edit your Firefox installation to get the “Always remember password feature” without having to run some JavaScript code on every page load:

• Shutdown Firefox
• Backup the file PATH_TO_YOUR_FIREFOX_INSTALLATION/components/nsLoginManager.js.
• Edit PATH_TO_YOUR_FIREFOX_INSTALLATION/components/nsLoginManager.js with your favorite text editor and find the following lines:

  Code:

              if (element && element.hasAttribute("autocomplete") &&
                  element.getAttribute("autocomplete").toLowerCase() == "off")
                  return true;

  On the GNU/Linux version of Firefox 3 Beta 5 this code is inside the private method _isAutocompleteDisabled, on the Windows version of Firefox 3 Beta 5 this code can be found inside the local helper function autocompleteDisabled which is part of the private method _onFormSubmit.

  To let Firefox password manager always remember passwords those “autocompleteDisabled”-methods have to always return the value false.

  All you have to do to achieve this is remove the lines above or comment them out like this:

  //            if (element && element.hasAttribute("autocomplete") &&
  //                element.getAttribute("autocomplete").toLowerCase() == "off")
  //                return true;

• Save your changes and close the editor.
• Restart Firefox – Firefox password manager should now always remember passwords ignoring the autocomplete=”off” attribute.

Plus Firefox still hasn’t learned some basic principles of the human interface guidelines, like “If a menu item brings up a dialog instead of taking immediate action, its label ends in …” or that icons do not change the left alignment of menu item labels:

Can I have Firefox 2 back please? There’s a theme that tries to make Firefox 3 look like Firefox 2, but why the hell do they want me to login to get it? Once I install this theme, Firefox 3 is better, but still not quite right. Some of the fonts are still a little off.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 at 9:43 AM and is filed under Mac, User Interface. You can follow any responses to this entry through the Atom feed. You can make a comment, Digg this story, or trackback from your own site.