Monday, February 23, 2004

Firefox (formerly Firebird) features & fix The free, open source browser Firefox is rapidly becoming my most-used piece of software, so here are the reasons why (as well as a note about solving a problem with it and OS-X). Also, here are new product, info and support sites for Firefox. Why do I like it? 1. Tab magic: Like Apple's Safari browser, Firefox offers tabbed browsing, but it does it just a little bit better, at least for me. I like being able to open sites in a bunch of tabs, then bookmark all of their contents into a folder -- great way to set up a reading list for a class. Firefox also provides double "suspenders and a belt" protection against losing things. With Safari, I've trashed work (or at least my train of thought), by accidentally closing an inactive tab containing a half-written blog entry or half-read article, but not with Firefox: Firefox puts the close-tab button at the right edge of the tab bar, where it's hard to hit by mistake. (You also can use a Ctrl-click menu to close an active or inactive tab.) Safari has a "close" button on each tab, and using a lot of tabs on my 12-inch iBook makes the close button take up just enough room for me to click it by accident. A Firefox extension provides the extra safety belt: It warns me if I try to close a window that has several tabs in use. Even the new Safari 1.2 doesn't do that. 2. WYSIWYG blog editing is still the main attraction for me, as it was when I wrote my illustrated review of the program last summer. With other browsers, you have to type your own HTML code for font styles, gratuitous color highlighting, lists, indentations, tables and Web links when editing Manila or Radio weblogs on a Macintosh. Firefox (old name, Firebird) and other versions of Mozilla take advantage of a neat edit-in-window menu. (The Windows version of Internet Explorer already has a similar feature.) 3. Problem solving. OK, this isn't a Firefox feature, but I always feel good when I get something to work, and the one problem I was having with Firefox appears to be solved, so this is the best place I could think of to mention it. The problem: After loading the latest versions of Safari and Firefox, I noticed some bizarre behavior: Like a grumbling ghost of browsers past, Microsoft Internet Explorer was opening in the background when I didn't ask for it. In its last OS update Apple moved the OS-X "default browser" selector from System Preferences to a panel inside Safari, so that was the first thing I blamed for Explorer's reappearance. Wrong! It took me a day to realize Userland Radio, my blog editor and RSS aggregator, was the real key to the puzzle. Radio opens a browser window as its editing space, presumably using the default browser. While I was playing with the new release of Safari, sometimes both it and Firefox were open. When they were, Radio behaved normally. However, if Firefox was running alone, an attempt to launch Radio would also launch Explorer, then Radio would stall. Radio had been fine with earlier flavors of Mozilla, including Firebird, which is why I didn't blame it at first. When I did get suspicious I posted questions on the Userland discussion forum... and found two very helpful users. Marc Barrot knew where to look to find that Explorer is still written into Radio as the default browser, while a Radio script enables other browsers. That script's "MOZZ" listing had worked for previous Mozilla browsers, including Firebird, which is why the Explorer problem never surfaced before. Firefox required a new code, "MOZB." Andy Fragen not only came to the same conclusion, he sent me an edited version of the "supportedBrowsers" script, which was great because I'd never poked into Radio's scripts. Result: I'm happily blogging this with the Radio/Firefox combination. Thanks again, guys. 4:47:18 PM    comment []

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