Those darn Firefox bookmarks

One thing that’s proving to be a deal breaker for me with Firefox is the way it organizes bookmarks in the sidebar.

With Safari, when you click on a folder in the sidebar, you get a list of all its bookmarks in the main part of the window along with their URLs. Click on another folder, and the list instantly changes.

With Firefox, when you click on a folder, it toggles open and the bookmarks are listed below it. This isn’t so bad if the folder is near the top, but if it is in the middle or near the bottom, you wind up having to scroll to see the entire list. And if you want to switch to another folder, you first have to close the one you’re in or you’ll wind up with a real mess.

Clicking on bookmarks also brings different results. With Safari, the sidebar disappears and the entire browser window is devoted to the site you’re visiting. With Firefox, the sidebar remains in place, creating a cramped view of the site. Some might argue it’s handy to have the sidebar stick around if you’re visiting a lot of sites, but I prefer to have it get out of the way.

Another thing I appreciate about Safari is that each of the bookmarks has a favicon to the left of it instead of the generic icons shown by Firefox. It’s a small thing, but it’s one of those nice touches that you come to expect from Apple products.

Posted Thursday, July 2, 2009 in

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StumbleUpon for Safari

Speaking of Firefox, one of the main things I use it for is the StumbleUpon toolbar add-on, which allows you to randomly browse websites in categories of your choosing. You can also give them ratings, write reviews and share with friends.

StumbleUpon is not officially supported for Safari, but there are a couple of ways to get around this. First, you can use a demo by clicking on this link. The toolbar doesn’t have all the features of the official version, but it looks slick and covers the basics. Second, you can install Stumbli. It puts another menu in Safari, with options for stumbling, reviews and so on — not quite the same as having a toolbar, but you can always use keyboard shortcuts. They want $4 for it.

Posted Tuesday, June 30, 2009 in

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Firefox 3.5 is out

The latest version of Firefox is out, and it’s faster than ever — or so they say.

According to Mozilla’s test results, Firefox can load Javascript-laden websites in mere milliseconds. This is a good thing, because an increasing number of sites use applications based on Javascript in one way or another. Think of all those sites that let you share documents, edit photos or backup your files.

Other features include anti-phishing and anti-malware technologies for better security, thousands of add-ons for customization, and enhancements to private browsing.

I’m a confirmed Safari browser, but I’ll be taking the latest Firefox out for a spin over the next few days to see how it compares.

Posted Tuesday, June 30, 2009 in

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Hey, we're on Twitter

We’re a bit late to the party, but you can finally follow thriftmac on Twitter. There’s also a nifty little logo you can click on at the top right. We tend to be artistically challenged, so if you can’t figure it out, that’s the Twitter bird skewering Scrimpy the thriftmac worm. You’ll mostly find links to the thriftmac RSS feed at our Twitter account, but we’ll occasionally throw in a few surprises as we continued to delve into the ever-changing world of Mac freeware.

Posted Friday, June 26, 2009 in

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TuneLyrics

Fetches the lyrics of the song playing on iTunes. If you like them, you can click on Approve and have them added. If it can’t find the lyrics, there is an option of having Google look for them.

Added to the iPod section    Download site

Posted Thursday, June 25, 2009

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A freeware wiki

It seems there is no end to the number of Mac freeware sites out there, but here’s one that’s a little different — a wiki. Downloadpedia has a number of categories listing software for all platforms. In the Mac section, there is best open source and best free. I haven’t tried it, but presumably you could join up and add your own apps. So far, the selection looks quite good — there’s none of the junk that plagues so many freeware sites.

Posted Tuesday, June 23, 2009 in

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ImageWell and ShutterBug at half price

Father’s Day is coming this Sunday, and we’re once again pleased to be able to make a special half-price offer for two of the best Mac apps around — ImageWell and ShutterBug.

ImageWell is the acclaimed little image editor that lets you crop, resize and more before uploading your pix to the web. And then there’s ShutterBug to help you create a beautiful web album with your photos — or pretty much any website you can imagine. A shopping cart feature makes this one a real gem.

With this offer, ImageWell is available for $9.95 and ShutterBug for $19.95. And by the way, that’s in Canadian dollars, so U.S. residents can expect to pay even less, depending on the exchange rate.

The sale runs from Friday, June 19 to Sunday, June 21. You can follow this link for a free, full-featured seven-day trial of ImageWell or this one for a full-featured demo of ShutterBug that adds a “demo” watermark to uploaded images. Purchasing a registration number will unlock them.

To buy at the special discount follow these links for ImageWell or ShutterBug.

Posted Thursday, June 18, 2009 in

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Bowtie

Control iTunes with shortcuts and submit songs to Last.fm. Choose from a number of beautiful themes or create your own.

Added to the iPod section    Download site

Posted Wednesday, June 17, 2009

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Vox

Lightweight, nice-looking music player supports FLAC, MP3, AAC, Musepack, Monkey’s Audio, OGG Vorbis, Apple Lossless, AIFF, WAV, IT, MOD, XM, Games Music and many others. Plus, there are several effects, and you can export to MP3, AAC, WAV and other formats.

Added to the AudioVideo section    Download site

Posted Tuesday, June 9, 2009

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The weird tabs are gone

The final version of Safari 4 is out, and the controversial tabs across the top that showed up in the beta are gone. Can’t say I’ll miss them. In their place are tabs similar to those in version 3, but with nice shading that makes it easier to distinguish one from another. Thank heavens sanity prevailed.

The progress bar in the address space is also back — sort of. There is now an indicator at the far end with a dark background that says “Loading.” At a certain point, the background turns clear. The jury’s still out on this one. In limited testing, it seems the background goes clear after a few seconds regardless of how much of the page has loaded.

Posted Monday, June 8, 2009 in

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