Making Firefox behave on OS X

Apple, Web

As Safari has been increasingly misbehaving lately I felt it was time for another attempt at getting Firefox to act like a proper OS X application. Key to this was support for Keychain Access, OS X integrated password manager. Luckily there's an add-on for that which does an excellent job of this (behaves just like Firefox's native password manager, but keeps information in Keychain instead).

For some reason Firefox 19 comes with Retina display support disabled (at least on dual screen monitors). The fix for that one is to set gfx.hidpi.enabled=2 in about:config. Haven't noticed any issues with it, so not sure why it's off by default.

The next issue that's always been bothering me was, why does Firefox' font rendering look like shit on OS X? I mean, on Windows it's expected to look like shit, but OS X has great font rendering, so why not use it? Turns out it's simply turned off for font sizes smaller than 20 for uh, performance reasons or something (you know, that old 80486 everyone still uses). Fixed by changing browser.display.auto_quality_min_font_size=0 and gfx.use_text_smoothing_setting=true.

Then I wanted Safari's Top Sites back, which I thought was silly at first, but I seem to have gotten very used to meanwhile. You know, that grid with pictures of websites to click on. Turns out Firefox already has this as default page for new tabs. To make it also the default for a new window and at browser startup, set browser.startup.homepage=about:newtab. Also worth tweaking were browser.newtabpage.rows and ...columns. Sadly it didn't import the ones from Safari, but they're apparently stored in JSON-like format in browser.newtabpage.pinned, so that was workable (I do like the about:config thing).

Now just banish Adobe Flash to emergency use only with plugins.click_to_play=true and install a replacement for Safari's Reader mode, which I use everywhere it works, because most web sites are designed to maximize advertising space instead of readability.

So far this has been working much better than any of my previous attempts at browser switching and it hasn't crashed yet. Oh, and if the add-on installer dialog is pestering you with an idiotic timer, set security.dialog_enable_delay=0.