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Now that is proberly the most sensible comment I read so far. It does seem stupid when firefox for the mac is poor and when they have a perfectly good up and coming browser. I think firefox is so multi-platform that they loose each platform individual uniqueness which im sure all of us and know that one thing we like to improve on our OSes. But its true the Mac OS X version was behind for ages. Im currenly tying this in safari and havent used it for a few weeks, but man its great to be on a great browser i forgot how brilliant it is. Now if only they can get rid of the brush metal look in 10.5...

*kaiwai nods so hard, his neck hurts* Hence, I could never quite understand the whole purpose of developing Firefox using XUL, given its bloatedness when it came to wanting to produce a nice small and compact memory consuming browser.

I understand the whole purpose of XUL, for webservices (its original idea), but why not create interfaces using native widgets from the ground up, then hook into gecko, and only use XUL when webpages required it? which then leads onto the issue of integration with the operating system which you raised; ultimately, when you create an abstration for multiplatformness, what you ultimately give up firstly is good integration with the underlying operating system and with that, it results in a product that never fully exploits the features in the host operating system.

Firefox seems to be the epitome of the multiplatform goals taken to the absolute extreme when they would have been better off from day one to create simply a set of core libraries on which people could develop a graphic user interface for; the MacOS X using Cocoa, *NIX using Qt or Gtk, and the Win32 developers either using MFC, Winforms2 or Qt (which is available free in the 4.x series IIRC).

As for the brushed metal look, I would say, given by the moves in their iLife product, they're going to phase out the metal look in favour of the more straight lines, 'curved metal surface' look which is now on use in iTunes etc.