If Firefox was more Mac-like and supported more of Apple's core OS benefits (spell checking in form fields, Keychain integration instead of the stupid mozilla briefcase), I would leave Safari immediately. Probably.
Problem is, Safari just looks so gaddamn nice. It just has a little more polish than Firefox...
Tricky.

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It's it's just looks that are keeping you away, check out the Uno theme for OS X and the GrApple themes for Firefox.

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Or give Camino a try...

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I wish those same things from Firefox but I'm hopelessly addicted to extensions like adblock and mapit. So I'm sticking with Firefox until they get their stuff fixed.

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Adblock for Safari? Ta da!

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I agree with you. However, the more Mac-like browser is really Camino. It really flies when rendering pages and is much, much quicker in response time than Safari. While Safari is nice, the page rendering is somewhat slow. Try to scroll a page of news at NYTimes.com (while highlighting with the cursor) in both browsers and see the difference.

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S Berger

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I'm sure Firefox is excellent, but it would have to be MUCH better than Safari for me to give up the automatic bookmark syncing I get via .Mac. I routinely use 4-5 different Macs, so that's a big plus.

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That is one reason I'm with Firefox. I can sync my bookmarks between my Windows machines and my macs with an extension called "Bookmarks Synchronizer."

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I was so excited when I saw your mention of "Bookmarks Synchronizer", and then so bummed out when I learned it can't be had for my version of FireFox. Bummer.

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osxpounder

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What version are you using it on? I have the latest version and it works great.

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that's what del.icio.us is for. you can sync firefox's bookmarks with your del.icio.us bookmarks with the extension foxylicious.

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BookIt. Shareware, but syncs between all browsers and .Mac

Especially helpful, since I switch every quarter to a new browser... Though for a while now, Firefox (with GrApple theme, Adblock, Informenter) has been the 98% browser - with rare stupid sites making me use Safari sometimes.

Keychain would be nice, though ...

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Based on your post I downloaded and paid for Bookit. Unfortunately, I can't get Dot Mac syncing to work with it. I wrote the author and here's his reply:

"I'll certainly look into this and I'll be sure to get this working correctly in the next version of Bookit."

Are you really able sync non-Safari browsers via Dot Mac using Bookit?

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Mike Newman
Saipan and Narita Layover Pages:
http://www.mgnewman.com

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I voted for Safari, but the battle of Mac browser is between Firefox and Safari. Firefox has generally superior renderer that is compatible with greater number of websites than Safari. And there are fine grain cookie management and Extensions, such as Adblock (Plus) and CustomizeGoogle. Points for Safari are Mac OS X look and feel, Mac OS X integration (e.g., spell checker, keychain), superior RSS viewer, and smoother performing render. Later is particularly noticeable when opening multiple pages simultaneously (either via new window or tab), as well as opening a website with embedded multimedia contents (e.g., Flash, QuickTime).

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Safari is just better integrated, but Firefox has extensions which you can't ignore again once you've enjoyed them. I'm using the SmoothWheel extension (which gives an adjustable smooth scrolling when using the mouse wheel) and when I try to use Safari just the stumbling scrolling turns me off. Makes it really hard to read long web pages. There are lots of other great extensions (AdBock, Web Developer, Sage, SessionSaver, DownThemAll, ScrapBook), but this is the first one I miss when using Safari and I miss it enough to not use Safari any more.

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well, sure Firefox on the extensions can't be beat, but i've found Safari to be more stable overall.

When Firefox supports css text shadow i'll consider switching.

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AFAIK, text shadow (which i use on www.progenetix.net) has not been included into W3C standards :-(

so nobody will make use of it in the future...

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Form spell check is the only feature I miss from Safari, but with all the Firefox extensions, I would die without stumbleupon, diggthis, gmail space, develpers tools, bugmenot and tinyurl extensions, to name a few.

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Check out Spellbound Development extension... Spell check as you type in FF.

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Safari for some reason is *very* slow when having to talk to the MS IIS proxy here at work. Firefox is just fine. However, I hate Firefox's interface. It's missing too many basic functions. (Why, for example, can't I jump to the end of the text in the Google search bar by hitting the down arrow like I can in Safari?)

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Camino is fast, good looking, standards compatible and extensible. Most of the other browsers are good, too but my favourite is Camino!

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Nah, nothing beats speed of Opera.

Mac Opera's startup time is a bit long, but then it works suuper fast. Compare speed of Back/Forward with any other browser.
I like Safari much, but it sometimes reloads page when going back. Being used to Opera I find that unacceptable.

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Camino's startup time *and* back/forward is blazingly fast. Even Opera can't beat it.

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I use Omniweb and go to Firefox when I have compatibility issues mainly because they let me get contextual menus just by holding down the trackpad button (mouse button?) on my Powerbook. If you could easily do the same thing in Safari, I'd use Safari in an instant.

This is when someone should jump in and say "That's easy, just do..."

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This won't do exactly what you're looking for, but you can emulate the "right" click with two-fingers on the trackpad and click using the iScroll driver (http://www-users.kawo2.rwth-aachen.de/~razzfazz/iscroll2/). Like I said, not exactly what you're looking for, but it may be a suitable substitute.

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Jayson --When Microsoft asks you, "Where do you want to go today?" tell them "Apple."

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Camino is my favorite browser, and Firefox is a close second (it was a closer still call to make before I started using Shapeshifter). I hate Opera (albeit not as much as IE of course), and won't use Safari largely because it does not have anything like Flashblock. The key factors that allowed me to move from Firefox to Camino were keychain support, CamiTools, CaminIcon, some quality pre-provided icons which I mixed to my liking, and me having some Photoshop skills so that I could replace the appicon.

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I usually use Safari. Mainly habit but it is more fully developed. HOWEVER, I specifically use FireFox for my broker's website (LowTrades.com). The trading portion of the site is set up in java and, even though I have dl'd and installed Apple's J2SE 5.0 Release 3 and made it the first choice via Java preference - Safari will not work at the broker's site. Interestingly, FireFox 1.5.0.1 does! Good news for me - no need to fire up VPC and deal with how slow it runs. Bottom line is, at least for me, both are needed.

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Rob, I was wondering if it was somehow possible to track changes in a user's preferred browser (perhaps if poll responses were saved in a user's profile?). I've voted in probably 4-5 of these polls, and I know I've changed over the years from Mozilla to Camino to Safari to Firefox for various reasons. I just think it would be interesting to see what kinds of shifts people tend to make, and why.

Just a thought...

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"I have seen the evils of procrastination, and I vow to change my ways tomorrow."

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I mainly use Safari, and sometimes Firefox. But the Shiira browser looks promising (same rendering engine as Safari, and a similar GUI).

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I was hopelessly addicted to Camino for probably about 6 months then I went to subscribe to an RSS feed and found, alas!, that it had no default support.

I switched back to Safari and haven't been disappointed since... especially since I use RSS, Atom, and bookmarks... that's about it.

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I agree that no RSS support is a killer. There seems to be little urgency by the Camino developers to address this either.

I find that Safari with Saft and Inquisitor is hard to beat.

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Safari is for me.

Ocassionally, I've got fed up with way Safari handles sites with Javascript, it is soooo slow so I use Camino out of frustration. But Camino with RSS support really puts me off after 5, 10 minutes of using it.

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Sorry, I meant:

Camino with NO RSS support is a really bad killer.

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I was starting get aggravated by the lack of RSS support in Camino, too. Started flirting with Flock, which is REALLY neat, but not a browser yet, imo. Played around with Firefox, which I do periodically, until I need to save a password and it doesn't jive with Keychain, then I fire up my Camino again.

Recently discovered the scriptability of Camino. I use NewsFire as my rss aggregator, and lo and behold, there's a script for Camino that passes RSS discovery off to NewsFire with a simple key combination. Not optimal, but better than life without any RSS support at all. (Add to the fact that NewsFire without browsing support was getting on my nerves, and... well... I'm not exactly in heaven yet, but we're getting closer.)

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Who are the four people who voted for it, and why?

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Because they use OS9?! :-)

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My wife is one of the people who still use Internet Explorer. For the life of me I cannot figure why she likes it better than Safari. But she does.

I spend 95% of my browsing time in Safari.

Mozilla will take a table on an HTML page and paste it as cells into an Excel document. No other browser works so well in that department and that's just a life-saver when trying to get price lists from my suppliers.

Firefox's lack of support for the core MacOS Services and the above Table-> Excel feature drives me nuts. That said I have all of Safari, Mozilla, Firefox/Mac, Firefox/Win, Internet Explorer 5/Mac, Internet Explorer 6/Win, Opera, and Camino loaded for testing purposes.

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Having three OSs on my desk (on separate hardware, real men use virtual machines just for testing purposes), namely Ubuntu, MAC OS X and WinXP, it's nice browsing the net always with the same command set.

Using Firefox helps switching, the same way as OpenOffice do.

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Even though it shares much under the hood, I prefer Firefox to Camino (and Safari) due to cookie handling. It allows you to choose each cookie, inspect the contents, and choose to accept by site, per session. etc., etc.

Safari seem to run java applications better, though, so I do use it to interact with my Netscreen/Juniper appliances.

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I use Safari most of the time, but my secondary browser is Sea Monkey (a continuation of the classic [not Classic] Mozilla suite). SM (and Mozilla) are IMHO more polished and less buggy on the Mac than Firefox. Since I didn't think Safari would need my vote, I voted for SM.

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As a web designer, Firefox + the Web Developer Toolbar + HTML Validator is absolutely unbeatable. Easily turns Firefox into the most important page designing tool I have - and it's all free.

Plus, decked out with one of the GrApple themes, Firefox looks more native to OS X than Safari does.

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Same for me as always: No other browser comes anywhere clos to the built-in pro features of OmniWeb.

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Safari with saft and inquisitor is perfect for me. Firefox is just plain awful on the mac, camino however is very promising and might potentially become my default browser when it becomes a little more feature rich. It's even faster than my safari setup if I use a G5 build.
Omniwebs pretty nice but I've always found it to be a little sluggish especially on more complex pages.

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Yeah. I love OmniWeb, too, but it';s so slow compared to Safari, and incompatible with a lot of sites (google maps for one). So I'm back with Safari, pimped out with the Stand plugin for lovely OW style thummnail tabs.


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If you identify yourself as Safari 1.2.3 to Google, OmniWeb works fine with Google Maps. Stupid browser sniffing is all that stops it from doing so.

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PB G4, 1.5 GHz, 2x512MB RAM, 128MB VRAM, 80 GB 5400rpm HD, SuperDrive, MacOS X 10.4.4

Visit www.thelandgallery.com for nature-inspired British Art

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65% Camino- general web
25% Firefox- ebay and security/ RSS/ BBC comedy!
10% Safari- Apple/ RSS/ updates/ sware search

Other experiements
Shiira ~ clean and smooth basic reading browser
dave

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I use OmniWeb primarily, and turn to Camino when I need the Mozilla engine's compatibility. The customization of Firefox sounds good but I don't like the proprietary password handling etc... I want an OS X browser that integrates with Keychain, the only thing holding Camino back is that you have to install CEP manually instead of it being built in, and the lack of auto form fill.

And I have the same issues with Thunderbird, that it uses proprietary functions instead of integrating with the OS.

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I use OmniWeb as my main browser. It has most of Safari's good points, plus a lot more. There are still a few issues which need to be fixed though. I have about 10 browsers I can use for specific purposes - and I would rate about half of them as "good" We really have some nice browsers available for Mac OS X!

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This is all very interesting, but I'd like to know what the most commonly/widely used browser is. Would the page-view statistics here at MacOS X Hints reflect Safari's apparent dominance.

Just wondering.

d

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Don't know about macosxhints, but at the site where I work Safari is about six times as popular as Firefox among Mac users. Interestingly, though, IE is used about 80% as much as Firefox, which is a huge contrast to the poll results here, where it's only a tiny percentage. I suspect this is because macosxhints readers self-select against IE users, being more Apple-committed, more anti-Microsoft, and more power-user-ish (and also, perhaps, less likely to accept IE's flaws).

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Another factor is that browsers sometimes identify themselves as another kind of browser, either by default or because the user has changed the browser's self-identity for compatibility reasons.

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G5- and G4-optimized builds of Firefox 1.5 from el Furbe, with GrApple themes, absolutely fly for me. The build doesn't launch quite as fast as Safari does on the G5 but once its up it is screamingly fast.

If FF had an Autofill feature as good as Safari's it would be my 100% browser..

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I thought I'd give the 'ol Safari a chance again--

but alas, I'm back with Camino..

Few reasons why-

1- SPEED... safari gets bogged down and spinning beach ball when you have multiple windows open with multiple tabs..

2- SPEED#2- camino is just plain faster and zippier clicking, back/forward, etc..

3- Better HTML compatibility- Vbullettin sites with Safari: not sure what it is exactly, but Safari doesn't support 'real-time' editing when replying in vbullettin sites.

MAJOR Complaint about Camino-- flash support.. NBA.com go there, try it, you'll see how SLOW it is in Camino.

This is on a dual 1.8 G5 , 2.5G, etc..

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I use Camino now, since the 1.0beta came out. With CamiTools, you get ad/flash block, find-as-you-type etc. Camino looks OSX native (which FF does not) has keychain support, services, great dock menu, and it is FAST. For page loads, its the same as FF, but for forward/back and scrolling, is much faster than FF.

I think i will stick with it, as it is the best for my simple surfing needs. However, it can be slow on flash-heavy pages, and has no built in RSS. For me, neither is a problem...

... its interesting to see how many good contenders are in this field (Safari, FF, Camino, Opera and all the others). I have been flicking between FF and Safari over the past years (started with Safari, then went to FF1.0 then to Safari2.0 then to Camino1.0 and have FF1.5 as a backup!). I find no need to launch FF (or safari) and will keep using Camino until FF is more integrated into OSX. I think we will have to wait until FF2.0 for a really good FF mac version, although 1.5 was a definate improvement over 1.0... its not up to Camino!! Im glad to see it in (currently) third place!

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I prefer Safari's GUI to the rest, especially with the texture (brushed metal) removed and the unified toolbar enabled. However, what is really keeping me glued to Safari is the availability of Saft by Hao Li. I can't imagine browsing without many of its features - type ahead support, url aliases, tab rearrangement, text-area/field undo support, etc.

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Camino is my favorite because it is the fastest I have found and also because each of its functions work exactly as I think they should. However, I find that after installing Safari Stand I am back to using Safari the most often. Anyone know of a plugin for Camino that gives it Safari Stand / Omniweb like functionality such as thumbnail tabs and shelves/workspaces.

I frequently use Camino, Safari, and Firefox, each for different things. Occassionaly I use Shiira and Opera too. My biggest problem with using so many different browsers is that it is almost impossible to keep my bookmarks neatly organized. I know there are shareware programs like Bookit and URLManager Pro, but they cost money. Anyone know of a free way to keep my bookmarks in all my browsers in sync? Perhaps with a script?

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When it gets down to it, Firefox supports & displays correctly more sites that any other browser I've used on OS X - over Safari & IE (since it's way old, besides who'd want to use IE?!?) It's also is quicker. I've made a number of websites and the truth is, is that Firefox is the easiest to design for. IE always has proprietary meathods & property names, and Safari can get confused sometimes.

In the end, IE's just plain horrible, and it's only because it comes installed on every PC did it ever become the standard for web, and I pity whoever would use the mac version. Safari's got a slicker look and some minor pluses, but... Firefox just outperforms, even before you start adding extentions.

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Honestly - I still like the features that were native to IE5 - but it has gotten waay outdated and they totally killed support for it last week and haven't put out any security fixes in years_ As much as I do hate M$ - IE5 - Mac Edition was completely stable and pulled me totally away from Netscape at the time_

These days I bounce around between Safari - it has good and bad points and still has a lot of catching up to the stability and esae of use the MacBU at M$ threw into the lfinal version of IE5 >> Camino and Firefox - same thing_ They both have many good things and many bad things about them just like Safari_ All three are still rather unstable - I have Firefox and Safari crash on me more than Camino_ Several sites I goto have issues with Safari so I'll jump to Firefox_ But then I need several windows of info opened at once and Firefox forces the Tabs option on the Apple-Click function when I actually need seperate windows [since Safari and Camino have the option to alter this] I then jump to Camino for other things 'cause Firefox won't display certain pages/ code accurately_ Yes I know I can Control-Click the item in Firefox to select the open item in a new window function but that does slow things down - especially during website development and testing - when i have to dig thru 50 or 60 pages at a given time_

So I put up with bouncing from Camino to Safari to Firefox and back again - only 'cause they are the lesser of the evils available right now_

Don't like Shiira or OmniWeb or Opera - Netscape 7.x sucks_ And I've played w/ver8 for Win and am Not looking forward to the potential relase for the Mac ver_ Not very promising_

Just like M$ did with HOTMAIL after they acquired them - AOL has done to Netscape - just completely turned the product to crap_

And Mozilla is just too rudimentary for my taste_ I've been wanting to play with Flock - just haven't pulled a copy down yet_

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I don't understand these people who experience crashes and gobs of websites that don't display properly.

I run 10.3.9 on a 700 G3 iBook and Tiger on a G5 iMac and rarely have any problems with browser crashes or non-functional websites.

On my G5, I'd probably stick almost exclusively with Safari if it weren't for Firefox's excellent web development extensions. I also quickly grew addicted to using mouse gestures in FF, but fortunately, Cocoa Gestures has allowed me to add that to Safari.

Finding a browser for the G3 is a little more difficult. Safari 1.3.2 occassionally has some rendering and javascript blips, which is unfortunate. Firefox is just plain slow, especially when I get more than one tab going.

I tried Opera, but don't like it. I tried Shiira, which is okay but doesn't seem faster—or better—than Safari.

Recently I started using a G3 optimized version of Firefox called DeerPark. It seems to have greatly improved upon my biggest complaint about Firefox: the hogging of resources and unresponsiveness in certain situations.

I had tried Camino, but had experienced quirkiness so it just gathered dust in my Applications folder.

Then yesterday, I downloaded the newly released Camino v1.0. I'm VERY impressed. Fast rendering, stays responsive, and doesn't bog my processor. Not only that, but Cocoa Gestures works with it.

<em>Most</em> impresssive, however, is that Camino allows me to scroll down a page while images load—something that Firefox and Safari struggled greatly with.

For general browsing, it seems to be an excellent choice.

Camino has now been officially added to my rotation, and threatens to become the new starter.

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Being a web developper I really like the WebDev Toolbar in Firefox and couldn't code with it anymore... I really which someone ported it to Camino and Safari. They are much much much needed in *ANY* browser... If it wasn't for that I'd switch to Camino right away. But at the moment I use Safari for browsing and Firefox for coding. Not to mention they are very useful for fixing broken site (disabling js, css etc).

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PM G4 DP 800 / 1.25gb / 120Gb+80Gb / CD/DVD±RW/RAM/DL
- The only APP Smurf

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Which browser is my "favorite" depends on what I'm doing. For general web browsing I prefer Safari. For RSS-related browsing I prefer NewNewsWire (its saved tabs are convenient). For other things I use Camino. And I've recently started using DEVONagent for "long-term" browsing because it supports saved sessions; I might be using OmniWeb more for that if its performance were improved.

I've never gotten comfortable with Firefox's XUL interface, plus its lack of Keychain and Services support is hindering. It'd say it's my least favorite of browsers I've used on OS X, which is why I never installed it after "clean" upgrading my systems to Tiger last year.

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