Previously, I had a blue iMac, and I always used Safari. Once in a while, a page wouldn’t load correctly, but I always figured that the dip page designer wrote solely for IE. That was pretty much my only problem with Safari, now that it handles Gmail well.
Meanwhile, while I was Mac-less, I’ve been using Firefox on a Win2k machine, and I can’t say I have any complaints with it, either. And by now, my must-have are pretty much standard for browsers… tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, and I suppose I’m only going to get more reliant on RSS feeds.
So I’m thinking, there’s Safari, Firefox, Camino, and iCab. I’ve really only used Safari on OS X, so what are you guys’ opinions of the various Mac browsers?
I recently switched from Safari to Firefox. It wasn’t a performance issue so much as an extensibility one: once you start playing around with Firefox extensions, you can’t use anything else. Firefox is a little more unstable than Safari for me, but the occasional crashing is worth the adblocking/Flash blocking/etc.
Opera is also available for Mac OS X, but I never thought the Mac version was as slick as the Windows one. Maybe that’s changed.
In my experience (which is a bit dated, since I’ve used nothing but Firefox for about 6 months), Safari is the best browser available for OS X. However, I switched to Firefox for the same rason as Nonsuch: I use it on all my other computers, and having one browser with the same extensions and keyboard shortcuts was worth giving up the slightly nicer feel of Safari.
You can add RSS to bookmarks easily in Firefox, not so in the current Safari. However, the new Safari, coming out with Tiger, has RSS and is even called Safari RSS. So you might want to delay your decision until you see if the new release suits your needs.
I’ve never tried RSS feeds, so I don’t know thing one about Firefox’s capability with them. As you’ve already heard, one of the big selling points of the new Tiger version of Safari is that it’s supposedly an RSS-reader’s dream.
I use Firefox for almost everything, at work (Windows) and at home (Mac). When there’s some weird compatibility issue with a page or some script, I revert back to IE at work and Safari at home.
My main gripes about Safari: I can’t figure out an easy way to turn off the damn link underlining, and I hate the way that it handles bookmarks. I much prefer Firefox’s sidebar.
I have been very happily using Shiira. It’s the same underlying engine as Safari but a much nicer front end. It feels faster, it lets you open new links in a background window, and you don’t have to hold down the bloody control key to prompt the contextual menus if you’re on a laptop and therefore lack a right-click button. And it utilizes Safari’s bookmarks file, so you can try it out for awhile with little effort.
I use Safari, my wife uses Firefox, just so that we can keep our stuff separate without adding an extra user to the machine. There are a couple of sites that I have to switch to Firefox to use. Both are fancy on-line stores that use some sort of hierarchical categories system,
PithHelmet, which was broken by the Safari update to 1.3, has been updated. It’s a plugin that does adblocking and the like. I’ve only just updated the plugin so seeing ads on familiar pages was kind of strange for a while there.
Likewise, there are other plugins that allow the activation of the debug menu and disable link underlining.
Safari is the one I use most - especially because I subscribe to .Mac and appreciate the ability to synchronize bookmarks across several computers.
I use Firefox for the occasional site that Safari doesn’t like, or when I’m doing web development, since there are extensions that can help me see what I’m doing wrong
I just launched Safari (v. 1.2.4, if that matters) and nothing of the sort appears to be true. Option-Command clicking does absolutely nothing. Option-clicking prompts a download of the html file. Command-clicking opens the link in a background Tab. Possibly I have some 3rd-party hack running that interferes?
At any rate, Shiira lets me open links in a background window without using any modifier keys, even with a one-button mouse (or a PowerBook’s Trackpad).
Firefox does let you open links in a background window. I know my brother does this with his aftermarket three-button mouse. You click the link with the scroll wheel.
To open a window in a new tab it’s Command-Option-Shift-Click which you could just map to one of the buttons for ‘one-clickability’. Most users find tabs very handy and preferable though so I can see why it’s a relatively obscure and tricky shortcut.
I used IE for Mac for a long time because too many of the sites I had to use at first were not Safari friendly and I never went back. By the time they were all my bookmarks were in IE and I didn’t bother changing.
Then came an article touting Firefox’s speed, the wornderful world fo tabs and this mysterious thing called rss. This then sucked me into blogging which I have now been doing for two months and love it and have rss enabled my blog, which is not to bad for someone who knew no html code two months ago.
While Safari is supposed to be Rss enabled, you also have to factor in the bug factor, the fact that you will have to pay for Tiger, ugh, desipe previous Apple promises that users would not have to pay for operating system upgrades which is totally disheartening. [Steve, if you are out there and I am wong about this, please just have a lacky correct this in a response post and I will be happy to apologize, but we thought that only Microsft lied to its loyal customers like this.] And that Firefox has a thriving extension building community going. These are mostly free.
One of the best of these does an auto-backup of what you are doing as you go along so that if Firefox does crash or if you have to force-quit it, you come back right where you were, sometimes even with a posting with this much text in it still intact.
On the other hand, Tiger will be widget crazy, so maybe some of those will do some of the Firefox things. But I love it. Beats the living daylights out of IE or any non-tabbed browser. Just so much faster to switch from view to view.
Hope this helps.
Peter
Oh, up to nearly 2,000 visitors now. Blog posts have been easier to do quickly because it is much easier to cut and paste between tabs than windows, even with 10 for 10’s window shade installed - which I recommend.
Actually, I will get Tiger free. From what I hear, if you buy a Mac between the announcement and the release date of an OS, you can get it when it’s released.
I’d like a cite for this claim; I have never heard of Steve Jobs or anyone else at Apple promise free OS upgrades for perpetuity, and I get my Mac news on an hourly basis.
You do get free incremental upgrades, of the 10.x.1 --> 10.x.2 variety, but I can’t recall any promise ever made of free 10.x --> 10.x+1 advances. If Apple were to make an announcement like this, the splash it’d make in the Mac community would be topped only by news that Apple was buying out Microsoft…
Oops. I’ll put it down to jet lag. What I meant to say was, “To open a link in a new window…”.
Anyway, I’ve never heard of the free major upgrades either. I don’t think it’s such a big deal though. They’re cheap for what you get, you’re not compelled to buy them and some expensive work goes into developing what gives your computer additional functionality compared to what it had when you bought it.
