Change Firefox to look (and act) like Safari

I’ve just installed Leopard on my macbook but I’ve been struggling with Safari when trying to get it to load Gmail. As there are only a few days left of broadband before I head back to Damascus I decided I would work around this problem by using Firefox (which I keep for emergencies anyway) as my main browser, at least until the compatibility problems are fixed. The only problem is that I don't really like the way Firefox looks on a mac, so I've modded the hell out of it to make it more Safari-ish.

Although this isn’t exactly Syria related I thought I’d post it all the same:

1. Change the theme

The first thing was to change the skin to make it look a bit more Safari-ish. This is really easy as Firefox has a huge selection of themes to chose from but I would recommend iSafari Leopard as this has been tested with some of the other add-ons which we’ll come to.

2. Combine the Stop/Refresh button

On Safari the stop and refresh functions are combined on the same button, unlike firefox. I found an add-on called UI Tweaker and this allowed me to combine the two very effectively.

Once installed you need to go to ‘Tools > UI Tweaker’ to change the settings.

3. Hide the status bar at the bottom

Firefox, unlike Safari, includes a status bar at the bottom which fulifills a number of useful functions such as displaying the loading bar and showing the address when you hover over links. This is however notably absent from Safari and wanting to be true to my aim of making Firefox as similar as possible it had to go.

This was achieved with autoHideStatusbar. When this is installed you need to go to ‘preferences’ on the ‘add-on’ menu and select ‘always hide’.


UPDATE 03.01.08
After looking around I have found that a much easier solution is to click on 'View > Status Bar' so that it is un-ticked. That should do the same thing, but it's infinitely easier!

4. Progress bar in the address bar

The Safari progress bar is located in the address bar at the top of the window. This is one of the most aesthetically pleasing aspects of Safari in my opinion. For this you need Fission which does exactly that. This has been tested with iSafari Leopard and I can confirm that it works!


5. Private browsing

Firefox has an equivalent so I thought I’d add it. It’s called Stealther and appears under the ‘Tools’ menu.

6. Bookmarks

In Safari there’s a little icon of an open book on the ‘bookmarks bar’ which open all your bookmarks in a different window. By going to ‘View > Toolbars > Customize’ you can add this too by dragging the ‘Bookmark’ icon to the beginning of the ‘Bookmarks bar’. Although it may look wrong initially, when you close the customise box it looks as you’d expect it to.

There are a few other bits which can be added such as SnapBack and Resizable form fields (I’m sure many more - please let me know!) but I’ve left it at that.

Much better.

Update 21.03.08

One particularly useful feature of Safari which is not found in firefox is the fact that it taxes its proxy settings from the Mac system proxy settings found in the 'Location' tab. That means that whenever I wanted to change networks I would have to change the system location for using Mail.app and Safari as well as change the Firefox settings through "Preferences".

But having installed a very useful add-on from http://blog.curthread.org/projects/systemproxy this is now no longer an issue as Firefox, like Safari, now takes its proxy settings from the system settings.