There’s a few Firefox fans among us. I can understand it. There’s a lot to like. On Mac, I’ll use Safari or Camino first, but Firefox’s extensions can add some great features. Besides the lack of spell-checking (due in the next major version), one of my big problems with Mac Firefox is that interface elements in pages aren’t Mac native interface elements.
Instead, they’re ugly Windows 98 reminiscent buttons: square and with a lack of style. Josh Aas points us at Cocoa Firefox builds on Mozilla’s FTP server with pretty buttons. The builds are named Minefield and have a great icon to go with it (see the image attached to this post).
These are development builds, so be ready for instability. It’s still a promising start.
How is this different from Camino?
Betanikpad.com already has aqua widgets for Firefox 1.5.0.5 -- http://www.beatnikpad.com/archives/2006/07/29/firefox-1505.
Sorry, guys. This might be slated to become a Cocoa front end for Firefox - one day. But as of today, it's Firefox for Mac with the old XUL interface. They may have finally moved the project in to Xcode, but that doesn't make it a Cocoa app.
caminos doesn't support extensions...
Note that all development builds of Firefox 3 are called Minefield; this is not specific to the Cocoa version.
Gerv
Well, as I understand it things won't change much. Firefox will still have its old XUL interface, that will probably never change.
XUL enables the extention interface so in that respect it's either or, with Firefox and Camino providing the two options.
What might just change is form fileds on the webpages might have native style wigits...
Firefox is still based on XUL.
What's changing is the use of Coca form elements, to give it a more natural Mac appearance.
Of course the theme for Firefox is improving as well, which will make XUL look more Mac like as bugs are fixed.
I should note Camino is Coca based.
It's pretty much impossible to move to coca and still have extensions, hence they still don't exist for Camino.