Make FF3 work like Safari

I hated Firefox 2, dreaded the browser on a Mac. Horrible UI, windows 95 form objects, slow, leaking memory everywhere, stuff like that.

Now with Firefox 3 though I’ve temporarily switched back. Native form controls make the browsing experience quite similar too. Besides that, Firefox is blazingly fast, it loads Apple.com in about half the time Safari needs for it so for now, I’m happy with it.

What I wasn’t happy with was the UI and some features Safari has I really missed. So how do you get Firefox 3 to behave like good ‘ol Safar?

With these themes, plugins en userscripts:

• GrApple Yummy Blue or Graphite Theme (hey, Firefox now looks like Safari, wow)
• Download Statusbar (Set the Download Preferences to the Download folder and you’ll never see that horrible Firefox download screen again)
• Greasemonkey (we need it for one or two userscripts later on)
• Fission (leave the default settings and now you’ll see the page loading progress in the address bar)

We also need to make some modifications to userChrome.css to change the RSS icon en disabke that stupid throbber.

Edit ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/something.default/chrome/userChrome.css. If you’ve never done that before you’ll see a userChrome-example.css, just rename it.

Now make your userChrome.css look like this:

• userChrome.css

This userChrome enhances the Firefox UI a bit. First of all it adds favicons to the Search field and the Bookmarks. It also disables that spinner thing (the throbber) and it rewrites the CSS for the RSS image which you can download below.

Last but not least download the following image: and place it in the same folder as userChrome.css

Now relaunch Safari, ehr, Firefox and enjoy!

Ohyeah, about Greasemonkey. It allows for Javascript injections in order to change elements on a page which can be extremely useful. For example: I use the OWA Beautify script to fix Outlook Web Access 2003′s layout (it breaks the calendar but I don’t need it so whatever).