Membranophonist’s Ramblings

I agree with Steven Garrity’s document claiming that Mozilla’s various projects need a substantial overhaul in the visual branding department. For OS X, along with adopting the Apple recommended guidelines for icons, the Pinstripe themes by Kevin Gerich should be made the defaults for both the SeaMonkey and the Firebird/Thunderbird (once available) packages. This will supposedly be happening soon with Firebird. Currently, opening any of the XUL-based Mozilla applications without one of these skins is a jarring experience, just about diametrically opposite to that of OmniWeb.

While the latest release version of Firebird is very good as a browser, it is not very good as a Mac application, largely because the Aqua UI guidelines are loosely followed (to be fair, Apple is guilty of this at times). I know that due to developer and OS makeup percentages, Firebird for OS X will always be a second class citizen. I doubt that it will ever fit as seamlessly into OS X as OmniWeb, Camino, or Safari. Despite this fact, I would like to see Firebird continue to improve steadily and will be submitting suggestions and bug reports.