Times have changed since then, of course.  Now I’m running Mac OS X Leopard on a dual-processor G5 tower.  Not new by any means, but it still beats the pants off Vista on my laptop.  Of course, Google has had its part to play in driving things forward, revolutionising web searches and pretty much anything we do online.  They’ve even brought out their own web browser, but sadly they didn’t think it worth while to port a PPC version of it, so I can’t use that.

However, I can trick out my Firefox to do some of the same things that make Chrome such a fantastic browser.

There are several key areas where I think Chrome has got it spot on.  Firstly, it’s simple.  Really simple.  In the same way that Google revolutionised web searching by stripping away everything but the search box itself, Chrome gives you only the controls you actually need.  The result is a user interface that is streamlined, uncomplicated and easy enough that a chimp with one eye could work it without hesitation.

Tabs are also rather cool in Chrome.  Putting them at the top actually does make a bit of sense, because it associates the location bar with the tab more logically.  It’s perhaps swings and roundabouts with the rest of the controls, admittedly, but I personally like the look of it, and find it easy to use.

Then there’s that insanely wide location bar.  Why is it so wide?  Oh yeah, there’s no search box.  Firefox thought they were so clever when they put a search box next to the location bar.  The rest of the competition quickly followed, keen to take advantage of people’s newfound love of searching for stuff.  But Chrome took it away again.  You might think that was a step backwards – after all, every browser before Firefox, including IE6, had one big location bar too – but Google built in a powerful search tool there too, so that the same box does two things.  Again, a nice bit of streamlining there.

Speed is another great arrow in Chrome’s quiver.  So great, in fact, that it’s left all the other browsers quaking in their boots and wondering what they’ll have to do to keep up.  Part of it, I’m sure, is a psychological thing: it looks simpler, so it must be faster.

And all of that is all very well, but I don’t actually have Chrome.  Because it won’t run on my Mac.  But that doesn’t mean that I can’t enjoy some of the benefits that Chrome introduced.

What you see in the screenshots above is not Chrome, nor is it Safari.  It’s Firefox 3.6.3 for Mac.  With bells on.  Courtesy of a few clever addons, this is how I’ve got it set up:

• Tabs on top, courtesy of the GrApple Crisp theme.
• Mac OS buttons and controls, also courtesy of GrApple Crisp.
• Combined location and search bar.  I removed the search bit from the toolbar so that the location bar extends to the whole width, and the CyberSearch addon allows me to search right from there.  Almost as clever as Chrome’s.
• Formatted URLs, thanks to the Locationbar² addon, which greys out the bits of the URL that are not the domain, and basically makes it clearer where you are.
• Combined stop/refresh button, made possible by the Smart Stop/Reload addon.  More functionality with fewer buttons makes me happy.
• Tab close buttons on the right, and a whole load of other little tweaks provided by Tab Mix Plus.

That’s what makes my Firefox look the way it does.  I’m loving having my tabs up top, I love the clean, streamlined layout, I love that I can search from my location bar, and I love that I still have all the power of Firefox under the hood when I’m busy working.  Okay, so Firefox isn’t as fast as Chrome, but no addon is going to solve that one.

Of course, I do have a few other addons installed, either to make my life more bearable or to help me out as a web designer and developer.

• Web Developer.  This gives me an indispensable array of tools for inspecting web pages, tweaking features and bug-testing my web sites.  Couldn’t live without this.  Although at the moment I’ve not got it displayed as a toolbar, because I like the clean interface I’ve got at the moment, but thankfully it’s still accessible from the menu.
• SEO for Firefox.  I don’t use this often, but it’s a nice tool to have every now and then to check how web sites are performing on Google.
• Screengrab.  This little baby takes a screenshot of a web page.  It can grab a selection, everything you can currently see, the whole web page (including below the fold), or even the entire window.  And it’ll either save the result as a file or copy it to the clipboard.  I use this quite a lot.
• FoxTab.  That’s the little icon on the far right of the tab bar.  Clicking on that gives me an uber-pretty wall of thumbnails of all my open tabs.  Which is very nice.
• Flagfox.  This neat little plugin puts a flag in the location bar to tell me where the server of the web site I’m looking at is physically located.  It also gives me more information if I click on it.  Nice.
• Fangs.  If you’re blind or partially-sighted, you’ll know all about JAWS, the industry leader in screen reading technology.  The Fangs addon shows me what JAWS would make of a web site, by rendering textually what a traditional screen reader would read out.  Useful for making sure my sites are accessible.
• Extended Statusbar.  Gives me some useful information in the status bar about how long each page is taking to download, how big it is, and suchlike.  A bit like Opera.
• Download Statusbar.  Puts the page load progress bar at the bottom of the window, so it’s out of the way.  A bit like Opera.
• DOM Inspector.  The DOM is the Document Object Model, and is basically the structure behind a web page.  This is a useful addon that helps me debug web pages by seeing how each element relates to everything else and what properties it has.
• British English Dictionary.  Because there are times when even I make spelling mistakes.
• Adblock Plus.  Because no one likes adverts.

So that’s my Firefox.  It’s not as fast as Chrome.  It’s not even as fast as Safari.  But it looks rather dashing, it’s fun yet professional, and gives me everything I need to do my job.

However, it wasn’t long before I grew tired of the plastic look of XP, and started modding my desktop with all manner of programs, making it look very little like Microsoft designed it to be.  Eventually I found myself themeing everything I could lay my hands on to make it look more like a Mac, striving for that perfect interface.  It was no surprise then when a few years later I bought my first Mac, a second hand G3 Blue&White.  Although originally it would have been only 450MHz the previous owner had stuffed a 1GHz G4 upgrade chip from Sonnet in there, which made a big difference.  In terms of numbers it should have been slower than the PC it replaced, but in fact it was still faster and smoother and certainly more satisfying to use.  Hooray for Apple!

Of course, avid blog readers will know that my little G3 didn’t last forever, and eventually ceased to switch on, at which point I bought the cheapest Mac I could lay my hands on at short notice – a 1.42GHz Mac Mini.  In terms of raw processing power the Mini was a little faster than the G3, but I noticed that it was still struggling under the weight of everything I was asking it to do.  It got there in the end, but lack of memory really bogged it down.  Clearly, 512MB of RAM just isn’t enough to run the 101 programs I use on a daily basis.

So, after some saving up and some careful eBaying, I finally took delivery of a G5 2GHz Dual Processor PPC running Mac OS X Leopard (10.5.3), with a whopping 2.5GHz of RAM and two 180GB hard disks.  This is actually the first time I’ve owned a high-end computer, and it makes such a difference.  It may not be brand spanking new, and it may be running on a PPC chip rather than Intel, but it rocks nonetheless.  So I thought I’d share a few of the highlights with you, along with some short reviews of the software I’ve been using so far that I haven’t reviewed already.

Mac OS X Leopard

At first glance the OS looks more or less the same as Tiger.  Everything is in much the same place as before, it works in pretty much the same way, and visually it’s all still very much recognisable.  Unlike the whole XP/Vista thing.  But it would be a mistake to say that Apple haven’t done much to release Leopard.  It’s all those little things they’ve done which add up to something quite spectacular.  The interface is mor consistent, the way the Finder works is a little more polished, the Dock has a bit more sparkle and fun in it, and there are some extra built-in apps that make life just a little bit simpler than they were with Tiger.

I actually spent quite a lot of time on Tiger trying to emulate some of the new features Leopard brought in, such as the unified interface (courtesy of UNO), backups (with a little help from iBackup), even Stacks (by simply putting a folder onto the Dock).  I’m pleased to report that the Leopard versions are the original and best.  Time Machine really is a one-click setup; I plugged my firewire drive in, Time Machine recognised it and asked me if I would like to use it for backups, and that was it.  I did look for extra options, but there weren’t any.  It just works.

The Dock was something that caught my eye when Leopard was first demoed by Steve Jobs.  No longer just a flat semi-transparent panel (as cool as that was), the new Dock is more like a shelf, complete with reflections of both the icons and the windows on the screen.  Very cool.  Not exactly a boost to performance or efficiency, and no doubt the novelty will wear off after a while, but it’s one of those little extras that make the whole experience just that little bit more satisfying.  It’s like finding that the cup holders in your car also have a slot for holding a stirring spoon.

I’m not quite so entranced by Stacks, though, I have to admit.  Sure, they look pretty sweet and have cool animations, but are they really necessary?  To my mind they’re a fun feature, but one that I would prefer to be able to turn on and off.

Another useful feature found in Leopard is the screen sharing option.  With another computer on the network you can log in and share the screen of the other computer, which apparently happens courtesy of the VNC protocol.  I’ve been unable to get this working seamlessly so far, unfortunately; I’ve got my Mac Mini on the network still, but I can’t directly log into it, I have to ‘ask permission’ and wait for it to be confirmed on the other computer.  That’s fine if your other computer has a screen, but my Mini doesn’t at the moment, so I have to either unplug the keyboard and monitor from the G5 and plug into the Mini just to confirm it and then plug it all back again, or use another VNC client to log in a different way.  I’m sure there must be a solution there somewhere, I just haven’t got to the bottom of it.  Incidentally, screen sharing with a PC works just fine.

Other built-in apps have also been given subtle make-overs, including Mail, iChat, Address Book and iCal.  Oh and the computer came preinstalled with iLife ‘08 too, plus a few other useful packages that nicely upgrade what I had before.

The G5

Right, I ought to say a quick something about the computer itself.  To start off with, it’s heavy.  Not just compared to the Mini, but compared to any other computer I’ve known.  That’s largely thanks to its metal case, but it also stands considerably taller than my old G3 Blue&White (which I still have, gathering dust).  Still, what makes it stand out even more than that is the sheer quality of it.  I took the side off and found myself looking at the most tidy and well thought out inside of a computer I have ever seen.  Beautiful.  Gorgeous.  Stunning.  While most PCs look like the inside of a Radio Shack back room, the G5 looks like an executive jet.  There are no random wires connecting odds and ends together, no unnecessary big empty spaces, no mess of IDE cables.  Just pure, simple elegance of design.

Unfortunately I had a reason for looking inside the case, beyond the basic intrigue.  The CD drive wouldn’t open; it just clunked and did nothing.  Further inspection showed that the drive must have shifted in transit and was sitting a little too high so that the tray was hitting the casing and not coming through the gap.  Corrective surgery was needed, but thanks to the G5’s marvellous interior designers this proved to be easy as pie.  No screwdriver was necessary, just flick a couple of latches and the whole CD unit unlocked itself and became free.  I was then able to reposition it, relatch it, and it all worked fine.  Nice.

It’s also got an Airport wireless card, Bluetooth, and a selection of USB and Firewire ports.  Which are all very useful too.

Firefox 3

I know this isn’t quite on topic, but I thought it was worth a mention anyway.  While installing all my usual programs onto my fresh Leopard I found that Firefox was offering its release candidate of version 3.  I had previously been a great advocate of Camino, what many would call the Mac version of Firefox, and had an alpha release of Firefox 3 for testing purposes.  There were problems with it though, and I stayed with Camino for the sake of stability and consistency.  However, now that FF RC3 is out, Camino hasn’t been used here much at all.

FF3 is a marked improvement over FF2 on the Mac.  Although FF2 remains arguably the best browser for the PC, on the Mac it was awful.  It was slow, it forgot where it put its memory (ah, the irony), and looked hideous.  FF3 promised a lot, and seems to have delivered on most of its early promises, giving Mac users a browser that looks good, feels responsive, and gives Safari some serious competition on the performance front.  And on top of all that you get that huge repository of addons just in case the basic functionality isn’t enough.

So FF3 is set to become my primary browser for the time being, even though it is still on a Release Candidate (which basically means it’s not completely finished yet, but they’re happy for people to test it for them).

The end

Yep, that’s it for now.  Of all of that, only FF3 is actually new news, the rest has been common knowledge for a while now, it just hasn’t been on my desk until now.  Still, it’s so nice to finally have a computer that is more than capable of running everything I throw at it.  I’ve got iStat meters in my menu bar showing what my two processors are up to, and so far they have yet to break a sweat…

On the whole, WordPress 2.5 works well.  Apart from one issue that remains unsolved.  When editing posts (like this one) there should be a little icon that lets me add images; that icon, sadly, does not appear.  A quick search of the WP support forums show that actually a lot of people are experiencing the same problem, and no one seems to have produced a definitive solution yet.  For the moment I think the best bet will just be to wait eagerly for WP 2.5.1 and hope they fix the problem, and in the meantime live without images.  Not a huge problem, as I don’t often include images in my posts, but it would be nice to have the option!

I’ve also just discovered that the link button doesn’t work in Safari.  Fortunately I can edit the HTML and insert it manually, but it’s a bit of a pain.  Ah well, no one said technology was flawless…

I’m also looking for ways to customise this theme to make it a little more personalised.  Any suggestions?