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The return of the favorite browser poll! Site News
It's been over a year since our last browser wars poll, so it's time for another one! This always-popular subject (over 17,000 votes last time out!) is one of my favorites as well, and we've run enough of them to see some trends over time (click for a larger version):
(Note for the chart purists out there: the time units on the X-axis are not linear, even though they are shown as such. They reflect the dates of the previous eight polls, not identical time spans on the calendar.) As you can see, Safari leads the pack, but Firefox is cutting into its lead, and may even surpass it with this poll.

To make things a bit simpler this time, any browser that received less than 25 votes in the last poll (DeskBrowse, Netscape) was lumped into Other for this poll. I haven't added any new browsers to this poll, primarily because I'm not aware of any major new releases in the last year or so.

So have at it -- let's see if Firefox surpasses Safari this time out. Spread the word, and let's see how many OS X users we can get to reply this time.
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The return of the favorite browser poll! | 22 comments | Create New Account
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The return of the favorite browser poll!
Authored by: Jailer Joe on Wed, Apr 23 2008 at 6:45AM PDT
Safari always has been my browser of choice and still is. Don't need Firefox's extensions but I do keep it on my Mac just in case Safari can't render a page properly (that hasn't happened for years though).

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The return of the favorite browser poll!
Authored by: sofstrad on Wed, Apr 23 2008 at 7:08AM PDT
Firefox 3 will defeat Safari. :-D

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The return of the favorite browser poll!
Authored by: zimmerleut on Wed, Apr 23 2008 at 6:51AM PDT
i'm still missing lynx in the list...

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The return of the favorite browser poll!
Authored by: robg on Wed, Apr 23 2008 at 8:22AM PDT
The entry for lynx/links/any command line browser only got 10 votes back in the 2005 poll, so I dropped it at that point. Sorry to say you're now an "Other" :)

-rob.

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The return of the favorite browser poll!
Authored by: operator207 on Wed, Apr 23 2008 at 12:18PM PDT
I'd rather be an "Other" than a "None of the Above".
;)

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Safari
Authored by: ecco on Wed, Apr 23 2008 at 7:08AM PDT
I've switched to Safari last year after using Camino for a long time. Safari is fast, extendible, reliable and nice. The progress of Safari's development is much faster. When worse comes to worse then Firefox 3 waits on my disk.

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I would love to switch to Safari, but...
Authored by: blehfu on Wed, Apr 23 2008 at 7:13AM PDT
I got hooked on Firefox extensions back when I was using XP. They're just so useful, and they're all so free, I've become a glutton... Next thing I know, I'll turn into a giant blueberry.

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The return of the favorite browser poll!
Authored by: tom larkin on Wed, Apr 23 2008 at 7:10AM PDT
Firefox has to still be my favorite browser since I use Linux, Windows, and OS X and can use it on all three platforms. I also have to have their extensions and add ons. I need gestures and ad block and the web developer tool, they are just too handy. Safari, while I have tried to switch it to my main browser just lacks some basic features that get on my nerves.

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OmniWeb Truly Rocks
Authored by: chucky23 on Wed, Apr 23 2008 at 7:20AM PDT
I'm always astounded that OmniWeb isn't more popular than it is.

Site specific prefs are something I'd be pretty unhappy to live without.

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OmniWeb Truly Rocks... but no-one wants it.
Authored by: S on Wed, Apr 23 2008 at 8:35AM PDT
OmniWeb isn't as popular as it could be for the simple reason that almost every browser nowadays is free. Why pay when you don't need to?

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The return of the favorite browser poll!
Authored by: Auricchio on Wed, Apr 23 2008 at 8:49AM PDT
Have you tried rendering the graph as a stacked-bar chart? Then we would see a better relationship among the different parts of each bar. That is the traditional way to show components in a whole. (A pie chart is another, but we don't want a pie for each poll.)

Using a line chart makes it appear that values are changing smoothly over time, and, since we have single samples at each poll, this is NOT the case.

Drop the dark blue background, which looks pretty but reduces readability.

Can you post the numbers so I can try to create a different graph?

---
EMOJO: mojo no longer workin'

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The return of the favorite browser poll!
Authored by: robleach on Wed, Apr 23 2008 at 8:54AM PDT
I find myself more and more reverting to Firefox because Safari's giving me the beach ball all the time now - probably because I still have 10.3.9 at home. I'm sure that once I upgrade my OS, I'll be surfin' Safari almost exclusively.

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The return of the favorite browser poll!
Authored by: luigi193 on Wed, Apr 23 2008 at 11:15AM PDT
WebKit nightly builds FTW!!!!!

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The return of the favorite browser poll!
Authored by: mzs on Wed, Apr 23 2008 at 11:28AM PDT
I second this. Maybe a month ago the nightly WebKit got at least twice as fast as Safari and the Safari update that came out after that did not make any performance improvements. I really noticed the speed-up on my old PPC eMac.

Oh and there is an adblock plus available for Safari/WebKit on Leopard at this point as well, and that was the sole reason I used FireFox before.

I marked other in the list, not Safari. Rob you should add a WebKit nightly to the poll next time.

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The return of the favorite browser poll!
Authored by: robg on Wed, Apr 23 2008 at 11:53AM PDT
I left WebKit out for the same reason that I left out Firefox 3 beta -- they are unreleased products, not officially supported. I assume Firefox 3 users are marking Firefox, and I would think WebKit users would be marking Safari -- unless I'm wrong, you can only use the WebKit builds with the Safari front end, right?

-rob.

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The return of the favorite browser poll!
Authored by: waderz on Wed, Apr 23 2008 at 12:12PM PDT
I can't believe that there are that many votes for Safari, one of the most uninspiring browsers that there is, and is slower (using 3.1.1 with 10.5.2) than all the other current popular browsers. Any current version of Firefox is way faster. A great alternative is Flock which has a lot of good extras that are too numerous to list in this post.

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The return of the favorite browser poll!
Authored by: acaltabiano on Wed, Apr 23 2008 at 12:32PM PDT
It's my epxerience that Safari is FASTER than any other browser. in my experience on the latest builds on 10.5.2.

All the people that keep complaining of beachballs & whatnot, I think there's something mucked up in your setup somewhere...

---
timing has an awful lot to do with the outcome of a raindance
http://www.randombob.net

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The return of the favorite browser poll!
Authored by: waderz on Wed, Apr 23 2008 at 5:00PM PDT
I don't get the beachball, but for page loading and image loading (on my MacBook) Firefox and Flock both load faster. This includes multiple unscientific tests and timings by myself.

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The return of the favorite browser poll!
Authored by: herbertbrubaker on Wed, Apr 23 2008 at 1:39PM PDT
I won't use Safari until it has a free adblocking solution that works. that's a dealbreaker.

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The return of the favorite browser poll!
Authored by: Pyrrhus on Wed, Apr 23 2008 at 4:21PM PDT
you asked it...

Safari AdBlock blocks ads in Safari.
It is free of charge and under the GPL license.

Safari AdBlock is easy to use: it just works out of the box!

http://safariadblock.sourceforge.net/

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The return of the favorite browser poll!
Authored by: mysterytramp on Wed, Apr 23 2008 at 8:02PM PDT
More and More I use Flock.

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The return of the favorite browser poll!
Authored by: osxpounder on Wed, Apr 23 2008 at 8:12PM PDT
"(Note for the chart purists out there: the time units on the X-axis are not linear, even though they are shown as such. They reflect the dates of the previous eight polls, not identical time spans on the calendar.)"

Then you should fix it. Showing a chart with an evenly spaced grid, even though the values on one axis aren't evenly distributed, is just plain wrong. Slopes will be steeper or shallower than they ought to be.

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