Tips: Firefox 1.5 and Firefox 2 on OS X

One main tip, but a second in store. First off, why do those fonts often look unbelievably small and ugly or just impossible to read in Firefox (1.5 and 2) for Mac OS X ? What gives?? Well, Me too. I wondered about this for a year and day. And then some. But hallelujah, I have found the answer! The key thing is one you would never expect. It is in the OS X System Preferences, Appearance panel, of all the unbelievable places. Why? I don’t freakin’ know. Because this small fonts unreadable and ugly affliction doesn’t seem to afflict Safari at all. Anyway, at the bottom of the System Preferences pane Appearance, you will see this:

Simply reduce it down to around 6. You may or may not need to restart Firefox for changes to take effect. I didn’t test that and don’t recall. Now, at least, Firefox is almost usable again. Well, actually it is usable, but a little flaky. If Safari just had a few more tricks under the hood, we wouldn’t need to use Firefox for anything much less for certain Ajaxian sites and tools… (wordpress for example)
Now for tip 2!

In Firefox 2, you can do something I love, make pdf files be downloaded rather than opening some stinking slow buggy plugin inside the browser. Here’s how… Open Firefox 2 preferences, click on the Content tab, and then look to the very bottom.

In the File Types area, click on Manage. Highlight pdf, and then click on Change Action, and select Save to Disk. No, not very Mac-like at all is it. Somewhere between Adobe-like and Quark-like, I think. But at least now you can view the pdf file at your leisure in Preview!