Regression
As I noted at the time, Mozilla Firebird 0.7 was upgraded (and renamed) to Mozilla Firefox 0.8 in early February. I’ve been using Firefox 0.8 since the day it was released on my Windows PC at work. I works wonderfully. On my OS X Powerbook, however, things are different.
I downloaded 0.8 for the Powerbook the day it was released, and tried it out. Within two minutes I had decided that I do not like the new “default” theme for OS X, Pinstripe. No knock on the fine folk(s) who put the theme together; but I simply dislike it. The actual pinstriping is fine, but the buttons, tabs, etc. were so different from Qute (the default theme for 0.7 and non-OSX builds of 0.8) that I found it distracting. Adding insult to injury, Pinstripe is incompatible with the Tabbrowser Extensions extension, which I find indespensable. After some searching, I found the home page of Arvid Axelsson, creator of the Qute theme. According to his FAQ, Qute should be available for Firefox for OS X “Relatively Soon”. Having read that, I closed Firefox and returned to Firebird 0.7 to wait.
It’s been three weeks since 0.8 was released, and Qute is still not available for OS X. Being that I stayed home (sick) today, I decided to give 0.8 a try again. I still don’t care for pinstripe, so I decided to try some other themes. I tried three or four, and all had the same problem… scroll bars are missing. They are functional, if you click in the right place, but they do not render. I’ve had this problem with themes on OS X before, in older versions of Firebird. I went looking for a bug in Bugzilla, but couldn’t find one. This seems unlikely, so I wonder if I searched correctly. I may try again later, and then submit a bug if I can’t find it already written up.
So, I’m back to using 0.7. I don’t especially mind, but I’d rather be using the newest version. I do think that changing OS X’s default theme, or at least not including Qute in the distribution, was a poor decision. One of the biggest selling points of Firefox for me is that I can use the same browser on OS X and on Windows. Without the availability of the “default” theme on all platforms, however, it doesn’t feel like the same browser.
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