The Firefox Installer Rosetta Stone
Posted on November 30, 2005
Filed Under /dev/null/ | 450 views |
On the Mac I use Safari because, despite all the advances it has been making, Firefox on the Mac is still butt-ugly and too slow to launch. However today Firefox 1.5 was released so I figured I’d give it a try again.
Download the disk image, open it up and… ta-da huh?
I’ve been using OS X since the betas and those install instructions had even me looking at them and thinking: WTF?
Evidently in their attempts to either a) be the ultimate in über-Mac cool or b) take the fabled Mac simplicity to an absurdly new high the Firefox team has created an installer-based Mensa test. Sweet.
No one likes a cheater but most people like to install their software without the skill-testing questions so I present to you the Firefox Installer Rosetta Stone:
Icon 1: The colourful one. That’s not just a pretty picture (and it really is pretty) but the Firefox application itself. If you double-click it Firefox will launch. If you double-click any other icon in the Firefox disk image nothing will launch. You can tell that because the Firefox icon is big and colourful and the other ones are… err, not.
Icon 2: A mini “can’t click me” Firefox icon getting an appendectomy by the Red Cross, in Herb Ritz-inspired black and white. This icon means “Copy Firefox to…” That plus sign is actually the symbol you see when you select a file in the Finder and drag it to another location while holding down the Option key. If you’re a regular Mac user there’s a pretty good chance you’ve never seen this little icon before.
Note however that in order to copy Firefox from the disk image you just downloaded to your hard drive you in fact do not need to hold down the Option key at all so in all likelyhood you still won’t have ever seen this icon before.
Icon 3: The “A” folder. Not to be confused with The A Team, this is your Applications folder. Grey and featureless here, it has far more personality that the Firefox team would lead you to believe. In fact, on your Mac it is a pleasant shade of blue, the images on its face are colourful, detailed and self-evident, and it has the word “Applications” written beside or below it in some big-assed black characters, most likely in a language you can read.
Blurry arrow: This is not the universal symbol for “drag”. I don’t actually know what the universal symbol for “drag” is (Divine maybe?), but this definitely isn’t it. However in the Firefox installer the blurry arrow means “drag”.
Chances are you’re more familiar with its more colloquial Looney Tunes meaning, which is: “goes really, really fast”. Do not to confuse the two here.
Beginning translation….
Full Translation: Drag this Firefox application to your Applications folder in order to copy it to your hard drive.
There, that was easy wasn’t it?