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Comment by vito | Hacker News Reader

I would not consider Firefox to be a "top-notch" Mac app. Every time I used it it felt slow, awkward, and clunky. I'd even find myself using non-native keyboard shortcuts (despite the native ones being available; e.g. F5 vs. Cmd+R) simply because it took me out of the "Mac native" world. No matter how close its emulation came there was always something to throw me off, mostly little GUI idiosyncrasies.

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It's not good on Windows either. It still better than IE though, but way behind Google Chrome. Chrome is fast and when I browse, I want to quickly scan pages and run JavaScript.

FireFox exists in my desk only because it has FireBug and a couple of other web dev. tools.

Actually, the web development tools and the JavaScript debugger in recent Chrome betas are starting to get really good, almost as good as FireBug and even better in some respects. You should definitely give it a try.

Actually, I only use FireBug for debugging JavaScript. For CSS, there is nothing like Stylizer. Just give it a try and you'll never use another tool.

Firefox was my default browser on Windows since v. 0.6 when it wasn't a Firefox yet but Phoenix. It was still my default when I switched to Mac, but with the release of Safari 3 Firefox was relegated to development/tools role. I'd say the only area it beats Safari is extensions. Alas, Chrome also has those now. When Web Inspector matches Firebug, my usage of FF will be for testing only :(

Strange, I use Firefox but rely on Safari for debugging web apps because I find the web inspector more practical to use, especially for CSS issues.

And yet, I'm writing this from FF on OS X right now because the awesomebar is just that damn good.

I've actually seen the benefits of the cross-platform approach first-hand, too. I've copied my same profile from mac to linux to windows and it Just Worked every time, extensions and all.

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