my name is mwd

There’s an interesting blog post by the Firefox UI specialist Alex Faaborg, talking about the user interface design in the upcoming Firefox 3 release, where he states:

Visual integration with Windows and OS X is our primary objective for the Firefox 3 refresh.

One of the things that’s bugged me about Firefox all along is that they designed their own set of UI standards that ignored the existing native ones. This would appear to be not so in Firefox 3:

Personally I think a unified cross platform UI results in applications that at best feel foreign everywhere, and at worst don’t even feel like real applications.

I couldn’t have put it better myself, as this is the major reason I don’t use Firefox. On both the Mac and Linux Firefox ignores native UI defaults and goes it’s own way. Although not mentioned in Alex’s post explicitly, the thing that bugs me most is the way Firefox has its own special way of handling keyboard shortcuts, which means all my muscle memory responses for actions don’t work. Whilst Firefox might be a nice web browser, it’s not important enough for me to want to deal with two sets of keystroke mappings in my head at once, particularly when Safari does a reasonable job and obeys the system specific keystrokes. With a bit of luck Firefox 3 might fix all this.