Firefox

Some great OS X Firefox links

Weeks ago I wrote about my migration to Firefox as a web browser. While it is great it still lacked some of the really nice OS X features of Safari. Tonight while reading through some of the daily sources I read, I came across a post on Hicksdesign that has several great extensions and outstanding themes.

Switcher

Well it's official. I'm a switcher. Not the kind of switcher that Apple has been advertising, however. Still using the trusty OS X machine (currently an iMac G5 with built-in iSight). And when the ship bearing all the money I don't know what to do with comes in  there's a Mac Book Pro in the future and a herd of Intel-based minis for the couple dozen embeded applications I'd like to run (entertainment center, car, barn etc.)No, I'm not a platform switcher but a web-browser switcher. The last bits of the transition included moving bookmarks from Safari to Firefox. Ellipsis Productions freeware product Safari Bookmark Exporter makes this a pretty painless process. Open the program (a 152k download) and three clicks later Safari's bookmarks are in Firefox. There are still some features that Safari has that are unmatched. RSS and spelling are the two major pluses. Safari pioneered the river of news format for RSS readers. NetNewsWire (which I'm moving to for RSS but that is a different post) kind of does river of news but it's slower than the day is long in that mode. On the spelling front it's more than just spelling. First though SpellBound is pretty good and now does in-line spell checking, it fails on the suggestion front. There is no simple "right click" to see the suggestion. It's multi-step and even the multi-step process doesn't work in Performancing's extension. The other part of it though is the inability to access the Oxford English Dictionary built into every OS X machine from Firefox. In Safari if you want to check the meaning of a word a right click "look up in dictionary" gets you a pop-up window with the meaning right there.

SpellBound for Firefox

Yesterday I mentioned the need for a good spell checker for Firefox. It turns out there is one. SpellBound provides great in-line spell checking for both web-forms and extensions like Performancing's great blogging tool. Now one gripe remains - it would be great if SpellBound had the suggestions for spelling in the contextual menu instead of having to bring up the spell check dialog. That is, however, a minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things. The ability to quickly add to blog posts throughout work is a great unbelievably valuable tool.

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