Best Of Both Worlds - Safari’s Style With Firefox’s Power at Keynote 2 Keynote

Firefox Safari Icon I’m still a 2 browser guy. I mostly use Firefox, but occasionally find myself surfing with Safari. Firefox is obviously the more powerful browser with the plethora of plugins and extensions for it. But in terms of design and looks Safari wins hands down. As always, Apple pays close attention to every detail.

So I attempted to combine some of the sweet features of Safari with Firefox. The best of both worlds… power and style :)

One of my favorite features of Safari is how efficient it is with screen real estate. It displays just as much info as Firefox in less space. Safari accomplishes this by moving most of what is normally displayed at the bottom of the page in the status bar to the address bar. This eliminates the need for the status bar. A neat little Firefox plugin called Fission allows you to duplicate that. Fission also allows you to display some other useful info in the address bar as well.

Fission Options

Another cool thing that Safari does is show only one button to Stop or Reload a page. This makes sense, because only one of the two actions is appropriate at one time. As a page is loading the stop button is displayed and when the page is finished reload is displayed. This saves you a few pixels and cleans up the interface a bit. There are a few ways to mimic this in Firefox. The easiest way is through an extension called Stop/Reload Button. No configuration is necessary with this little guy. Just install it and enjoy your new stop/reload button.

I looked and looked and looked, but couldn’t for the life of me find a good Safari replica theme for Firefox. A few decent ones are floating around for Firefox 1.5, but none are available for 2.0. After quite a while of searching I ran across a semi decent Safari-ish Theme. The tab interface, bookmark toolbar, and the navigation toolbar are all very similar to Safari. The only thing that its missing is the brushed metal texture.

With these extensions and theme installed I almost don’t realize that I’m using Firefox. While the Safari-ish theme may not be for everyone, I would highly recommend Fission and the Stop/Reload Button extensions.

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9 Responses to “Best Of Both Worlds - Safari’s Style With Firefox’s Power”

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1 Leon Kiriliuk Apr 3rd, 2007 at 7:58 pm

I’d love to see a plugin that allows you to press Ctrl-Command-D and pop up a dictionary definition of whatever you have highlighted!
2 Nick Young Apr 3rd, 2007 at 10:05 pm

Leon,

While this workaround is definitely not as efficient as the Ctrl Command D command in Safari, here’s what I do.

I have the Dictionary.com search bar plugin installed in Firefox. If I want to search for a word I double click it and hit Apple C to copy the word to the clipboard. I then hit Apple T to open a new Firefox tab. Now I hit the tab key to put the keyboard focus in the search bar. Now hit Apple V and then enter and the word will be looked up at Dictionary.com.

If you’re used to the simplicity of the Safari Dictionary method this will seem complex and ugly. But it works…
3 Nick Young Apr 3rd, 2007 at 10:33 pm

I did a bit of searching around and didn’t find a Firefox plugin to replicate Safari Dictionary’s functionality. But I did find this neat trick…

This is a nice hint, but it still requires that you type a URI into your browser. An earlier followup pointed out that Cntl-Cmd-d does the job automatically, but that only works in Cocoa apps (and frankly I’ve found it to be a bit spotty — sometimes it works, sometimes not). If, however, you are partial to Firefox or any other non-Cocoa browser (though this will work in Cocoa browsers as well, of course), you can get almost the same functionality with a little javascript. Specifically, create a bookmark called “Dict” and for the location enter:

javascript:x=escape(getSelection());if(!x){void(x=prompt(’What should I look up?’,”))};window.location=’dict:///’ x

Stick that bookmark on your Firefox toolbar. Now you can call up (a running copy of) Dictionary.app for a definition of a word you come across while browsing just by highlighting it and clicking on your new bookmark. (Just clicking on the bookmark without highlighting anything will bring up a dialog box in which you can enter a word manually.)

Note the same trick can be used to call up Google for definitions. In this case, create a bookmark called “GoogleDict” (or whatever) and use the following code for the location:

javascript:x=escape(getSelection());if(!x){void(x=prompt(’What should I look up?’,”))};window.location=’http://www.google.com/search?query=define:’ x

More generally, you can alter this code to do a search on any site with a searching mechanism — Wikipedia, Amazon (nice for looking up highlighted book titles or authors), whatever. Just go to the site in question, enter a search string, and use the resulting URI as the basis for revising the javascript to define the location of a new bookmark for searching that site. Just replace the specific search string you used with “x” in the javascript, as that is the variable that is carrying the string that you’ve highlighted.

BTW, I did not invent the basic code here. I’ve been using it for so long I don’t remember where I found it, but it is quite likely that I saw it in a MacOSXhints hint!

Source: MacOSHints.com

If I run across a plugin I’ll be sure to let you know :)
4 Galley Apr 4th, 2007 at 5:29 am

Back in my PC days I used Opera. The Saft plug-in adds nearly all of Opera’s features to Safari.

http://haoli.dnsalias.com/Saft/
5 Jack Apr 4th, 2007 at 8:21 am

You might want to give Flock a try. It has all the power of Firefox and its extensions plus some great added features built in for social media such as blog editing, Flickr integration, and an interesting RSS reader… Honestly,I use it as a back up. Safari is still the main browser for me with some extras tossed in (Safari Stand, forgetmenot, and of course inquisitor).
6 Jeff Vance Apr 4th, 2007 at 11:27 am

i just use firefox.. all of the extensions rock.
safari is a backup now…
7 Nick Young Apr 5th, 2007 at 10:40 pm

I’ve heard some neat things about Flock. When I get some time I’d like to install it and give it a whirl. If it’s every bit as powerful as Firefox, but has nice integration with social media, I think I’d like it. Thanks for the suggestion Jack.
8 D.J. Jul 20th, 2007 at 10:53 pm

I saw a safari theme in Firefox themes called iSafari.