h3h.net

So Safari 4 Beta is out, but it’s apparent that they’re still not designing the browser for me. The things that keep me with Firefox are above all its extensions and general customizability. WebKit is a better rendering engine and Safari’s UI widgets are arguably second to none, but the browser itself may as well be set in stone.

Mostly for my own future self’s benefit, here are the things that I want in a browser and can currently get in Safari:

• Ad blocking
• Google Gears
• Some web developer tools
• Keyword URL location bar searches—there is no reason to have a separate search box when I can do ten times more within the location bar. Though, inexplicably, I can’t hide the stupid search box.

But then there are the things I want that are not (to my knowledge) available with Safari:

• Mouse gestures for any application or page-level action (All-in-One Gestures for Firefox)—specifically I want “swipe down” to be “scroll to the bottom of the current page” and likewise for “swipe up”.
• An integrated view of downloads (Download Statusbar for Firefox)—I hate separate windows and this extension is glorious.
• Up/down control of metrics in developer tools (Firebug for Firefox)—I’m sure this seems minor to most, but single-click-then-up-or-down-key to change values on the fly in Firebug’s Layout tab is infinitely more efficient than Safari’s current Web Inspector interface. Firebug’s interface in general is much quicker and more fluid.
• Full control and view of cookies at all times (Firecookie for Firefox)—this is extremely valuable when debugging cookie-based issues, which is far too often in my line of work.
• Ability to re-bind or define new keyboard shortcuts for anything (keyconfig for Firefox)—I want to use the best key shortcuts for the job and I’m not going to be stuck with whatever some random designer set the defaults to.
• Ability to edit all application menus (Menu Editor for Firefox)—similar to key shortcuts, I only want my menus filled with exactly the things I want, in the order I want them.
• Open media how I want it opened (Open in Browser for Firefox)—if I know that something is a text format, I may not want it launched in a separate application; I just want to view it in the browser.
• Organization for my user stylesheets (Stylish for Firefox)—Safari has the ability to specify one user stylesheet, but that’s messy and hard to manage. I have tons of user stylesheets and I want to have a manager that lets me organize, disable, edit and preview them on the fly.

There are other extensions that I like, including Screen grab!, YouTube Comment Snob, Measureit and Live HTTP Headers, but there are either out-of-browser alternatives or I could live without them if I had everything else. Note well that everything in the above list is an extension to Firefox, not a feature of the browser itself. It’s precisely the extensibility and market for extensions around Firefox that make it such a powerful browser, both for personal and web development use.

All of these requirements that seem picky have been honed over years of use to give me an extremely efficient and pleasing browsing experience—not something I’m going to sacrifice anytime soon. So for now I’ll suffer through Gecko’s slower JavaScript execution, painful page load times and sluggish browser start up time because Firefox is exactly the browser I want it to be; not because it was built that way, but because it was built to let other people make of it what they wish.

I’ll be pleasantly surprised if Chrome or another WebKit-based browser scoops up the market for extensibility from Firefox, but for now I’m stuck here.