To be completely fair I have not used any of the betas, but the majority of Gruber’s gripes apply to all previous releases. To have not installed anything past 2.x is in itself telling since my history with the browser goes way back to the pre-1.0 betas, and I love to give new applications a good going-over. However, since switching to the Mac about 4 years ago I’ve grown weary of the half-baked user experience.

Mozilla’s approach to Mac development isn’t so much lazy or a lack of qualified developers, I think, but a result of the organization’s over-arching approach to software design. The idea is to give a seamless experience across platforms so the Mac version looks and acts like its Windows and Linux counterparts. This is a nice theory, but I often find applications like this end up not feeling quite right anywhere, least of which on the Mac.

However, Firefox 3 is supposed to change all that, but the problem isn’t so much the look of the application, but its behaviour. This is the crux of John’s post and why I’ve stopped using Firefox. Skins can make Firefox look like anything, but if it doesn’t act like the OS it’s running on, that is ultimately the bigger problem.

Camino, Firefox’s OSX-native brother is a fantastic alternative (and my default browser), but lags behind in features and, most painfully, addon support. As a web developer this hurts most because for me Firefox is basically a platform on which to run Chris Pederick’s amazing Web Developer toolbar, among a few other notable addons. When Firefox 3 is released and my required addons are made compatible, I’ll upgrade, but until then, count me out.

Via Daring Fireball