Back to Safari… for Now
Published at 10:44 on 21 November 2017
Circa 2011 I dumped Safari for Firefox. Safari had come out with what I term a “turkey upgrade” that made it painfully slow. Plus, Safari’s Javascript engine has always tended to suck. Add to that the recent slowness factor and it was worth putting up with how Firefox’s UI sometimes annoying departs from normal Macintosh standards.
Now Firefox has come out with a turkey upgrade of its own: Firefox Quantum. It’s almost hideously ugly and un-Mac-like. There’s so much clutter up top that the box that you enter the URL to browse to in can almost never display the whole URL at once any more.
Worse, the designers made the atrocious decision to devote the entire top part of the window to the browser tabs; there’s not much place to click on if you just want to move the browser window. You must fight your way to one of the far top corners in order to do that (and “fight” is the correct word, given that it makes it needlessly difficult to move the browser window).
What happens, of course, is that I’m used to Firefox acting how it used to (and, for that matter, how every other Mac program works), where the entire top most part of the window can be used to grab and move it. So I end up grabbing a tab and moving it. Which of course causes the tab to become a window of its own. This is something I almost never want to do. Congratulations, Firefox, you’ve made it easy for me to do something I almost never want and needlessly difficult to do something I often want.
Back to Safari for now.