Surely I'm not the first to comment?

I voted Firefox for its expandability, though it depends on which machine I am using. Safari rules my MBA fot the simple reason that it responds to gestures, which Firefox doesn't.

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I have to admit that I wish the gestures worked in Firefox. That being said, I wish Safari worked with a keyboard. Both firefox and IE use somewhat compatible keystrokes for Back/Forward, etc. Safari uses Cmd-[ and Cmd-]. WTF? On Windows, Safari has more of the common behaviors enabled. The most irritating part is that you can use Cmd-Left and Cmd-Right in Mac Safari until it decides you can't. It works sometimes, and sometimes not.

Safari may be faster, but I don't want to be constantly pissed (and not the good kind for the British readers) while web surfing.

Additional kudos to firefox:

type-to-search (or use /)
- It's simply faster, easier to use, and more powerful than Safari's Find
- Want to go directly to the search box on this page here? start typing "sear" and Cmd-G (if necessary) until you get to the text "Search:" before the text box. Hit TAB and you're in the box.
- Want to logout? Type "logout" and hit ENTER.

extensions (can't say enough about extensions)
- session saver
- GreaseMonkey (for news sites where 15% of the page is the actual story)
- No script (for selectively blocking Java/Flash)
- RefreshBllocker (to stop forbes news form advancing to the next slide before I'm ready and to keep my bank from changing my page view when it auto logs me out)
- Sage (the best little RSS reader around - IMHO, you can read most sites without ever visiting the actual site)
- *other (for everyone with different needs)

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The most important thing that keeps me with FF2 is Google Gears support.
http://alpay.wordpress.com

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I used to use Opera 9, but Firefox 3 is just so amazingly good (especially compared to FF 2) that it's taken over as the default browser on my machine. In many ways, it's negated the need for Camino.

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Same for me, I used to use Camino for most browsing but FF3b5 is so much nicer (extensions and all that) that I did not even install 1.6.

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Are you comparing Camino 2.0a1pre with FF3b5? Or do you think Camino 2.0a1pre to unstable to compare with FF3b5?

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Yeah, I think FF3 is going to really push Firefox usage up. It's a very slick, nice browser.

Long live FF3!

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I agree. Firefox is better than Safari in many ways.

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Last year I switched from Firefox back to Safari because Firefox was just too slow.

Now that Firefox is working faster on the Mac (maybe because I have a faster, Intel Mac now?), I'm switching to Firefox again.

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I normally use OmniWeb. Started using Flock. Not bad (especially the rendering of the latest trunk builds moving to Firefox 3.0). OmniWeb is great for developing, flock is great for maintaining all my social network crap.

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As a web developer, I know most of the problems that most of web browsers have. I cannot believe how many people like Safari over Firefox. It just drives me nuts sometimes thinking about it.
The world was so upset with Microsoft building a web page rendering engine into the OS. Well, what do we think WebKit is? Safari is just a front end. Another reason I like Firefox better - it's the underdog and it's performance is amazing - and moreso because of the fact that it is being compared to an OS-integrated rendering engine.

---
Freelance web development
WebVeteran.com

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giulio, I voted for Safari and I can't see what's wrong with it. Webkit is open source, leading is standards-compliance. Plus most other browsers, including Firefox, just have worse usability. I sometimes use Firefox, but the amount of bad design and just simply bugs always turn me away from it again. Just my 2 cents.

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If IE had followed specs and been open source, it wouldn't have garnered most of the criticism of it's integration into the OS. Also, when was the last time an Apple app didn't respect the system default browser? There are still quite a few MS apps which force the use of IE for links and such.

--Andrew

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stop talking nonsense.

webkit is a package on its own that is open-source and can be re-used properly within different platforms/operating systems/programs. It is not OS-integrated in any way. It's just like any other .pkg in OS X.

the ff rendering engine on the other hand never made it into an easily re-usable package on its own, which is why it isn't actually very popular these days amongst open-source developers.


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WebKit is a separate package, but it is also OS-integrated. OS X uses WebKit as it's engine for everything from Help Viewer to Safari, possibly Software Update as well. I imagine WebKit could be replaced within OS X, but I don't know why I'd want to.
OS X relies on the presence of the engine for certain functions, but not the other way round.

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Microsoft didn't deserve the trouble it got from building IE into Windows. What it deserved was a heck of a lot more trouble than it got for building Windows into IE.

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Firefox is the underdog? Compared to what? Safari?
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Anyway, as I mentioned below, I find I use so many standard OS X services that FF is unusable... if it was a proper application, I might use it.

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I was a big Safari user, would use Firefox for somethings. Firefox never seemed SO fast to me, like others claimed.

Within 30 minutes of trying Flock, I was hooked. The features are much more to my liking and it seems oh-so-much faster than both Safari and Firefox.

It has been my one and only browser since trying it.

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Well, not really forever. I don't use it on my Intel based macs because it isn't universal binary.

I use it on my G5 towers as my primary browser because it's solid with a good rendering engine, doesn't have weird memory issues, *and* it behaves like a mac application should (up arrow in a text box goes to the beginning of the box, command w closes a window when there aren't any more tabs, etc).

A lot of those little exceptions that the Mozilla team made for the Mac got reverted in Firefox for the sake of cross platform equivalence. :-(

I use Firefox for web development though... Firebug is incredible and the LiveHTTPHeaders, HTML Validator, MeasureIt and ColorZilla extensions are very helpful.

If you use Mozilla, grab the Pinstripe theme. For Firefox, try the GrApple (Eos) or iFox theme. A good theme makes a mozilla product feel like it really belongs on the mac.

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I believe Seamonkey is a universal binary, and will have features and security updates to the old Mozilla suite.

--Andrew

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Instead of installing all those extensions for web development, have you just looked at the Web Developer Toolbar? It seems like all your extensions could be replaced by this one.

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I voted for Firefox but I'm scared to put Firefox as my default browser so I still use Safari as my default even though it is not my favorite. Safari just completely fails too often (core dump or hang or something like that). So, I voted for Firefox. Plus, Firebug (for Firefox) is really the big big win for me.

As far as usability and interface, I like Safari's better but I think that is mostly just because I'm use to it.



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Sure, FF is expandable. However, the more extensions you install, the slower FF seems to run. At least that was my impression with 2.x. So, I started uninstalling extensions I once had installed. I am down to just one: AdBlock Plus.

I have a few 'extensions' installed for Safari and it doesn't seem to effect it's performance. Mind you, Safari doesn't have as many as FF, but I hardly ever used the extensions I had installed in FF. Also, a lot of FF extensions are "built-in" to Safari. For instance, when attaching files or needing to upload a file, you can simply drag the file to the button and it's linked for the upload.

When FF3.0 comes out for real, I'll be checking out FF again to see if it's improved any from 2.x. I have it now in B5, but it still crashes sometimes and I really had a browser crashing on me.

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I'd suggest upgrading to the latest nightly of Firefox. Normally it's not a good idea, but the stability is much better as they progress towards a release candidate.

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Firefox doesn't respect OS X context menu extensions. I have a dozen or so commands that I've added to OS X context menus using OnMyCommand, & which I use regularly while browsing (e.g. search for selected text as author in library databases etc.). As long as Firefox fails to support OS X context menu extensions, I'm sticking with Safari.

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I have a bunch of extensions, but I only use one or two mostly. The rest are for occaisional use. I found that you can have lots of them installed and Firefox will run just fine if you disable the extensions. Enable/Disable does require a restart, however, but Firefox restarts pretty cleanly. Enable the less-used extensions only when you need them.

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When I'm at home, Safari.

When I'm at work doing web development:

- Camino for doing my site admin stuff
- Safari for viewing the front end of the site
- Firefox for using Firebug to scrutinize the css and html.

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Ha! That's exactly how I work.

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iCab rules. They invented ad-filtering 10 years ago, and above all managed to keep their advance up to now (e. g. adding a "download" button in front of youtube videos is now a click away, etc.).
Stay in the herd or try it! ;-)
Hervé

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I just switched to Camino last week and so far I love it, it seems to be faster than Firefox and even though it isn't it just seems more solid.

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I flirt with Firefox - and I really like the new address bar in 3.0 Beta 5 - but Safari renders and displays images with so much more clarity. I always end up switching away from Firefox because the pictures are so flat.
Safari is also much better at handling .pdf files - although Firefox is better for adding rss feeds to Google Reader



---
G5 iMac, MacBook Pro 15", 10.5

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"Safari is much better for handling PDF files"
Can FF handle them at all?

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I am still using Safari on Mac OS X, because it seems faster than Firefox and is just better integrated in the OS. However, lately (since Safari 3) it crashes quite often on me, i.e. on certificate handshakes over a http-proxy, ...
If this continues for much longer, I am gone and use Firefox again, which was my favorite on Linux since it was available.

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Firefox 3 definitely.

Safari is my least favorite browser on the Mac. It drives me nuts every time after using it for 5 or 10 minutes because it does not handle tab right, does not sort bookmarks alphabetically, does not handle google notebook, does not sort google (finance) portfolio, etc.



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I mainly use Firefox for the extensions, and as a Web developer, it simply can't be beat.

But the other reason I use it is that Safari will only save Web pages as WebArchives. That's great if you are going to open them with a WebKit compliant browser, but it does you no good if you're on any computer that doesn't have WebKit. Yes you can convert WebArchives to HTML but they get completely screwed up in the process.

Firefox (and especially the ScrapBook extension) saves pages as they appear, and it saves them in the universally readable HTML format rather than the WebArchive format.

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Huh?

File -> Save As... -> Format: Page Source

will save a file as HTML in Safari.

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That only saves the HTML--no images, css files, javascripts, etc. Sorry if I wasn't clear. But I meant that Firefox will save the complete Web page including all of its contents (images and all) completely intact while leaving the source document in HTML. You can open the HTML document in any browser and see the page exactly as it looked on the Web.

You could send the page (and its folder of images) to someone on Linux and have them see it exactly as it originally appeared. This is what you can't do with Safari.

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I use Firefox v2 on my computer and my wife uses Safari on hers. When we are in Florida with only one computer between us it works out better that way. I like the extensions in Firefox. I'd probably use Safari more often if McAfee Site Advisor were available for it.

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I use Safari because there is no other browser on the Mac that can display PDFs on intel macs.

I've yet to see a Firefox extension that was worth the clutter it added to the browser, so the lack of extensibility really isn't a drawback for me. I would probably be using Camino (page compatibility without the bloat) if it weren't for th PDF thing.

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My opinion may be tainted by the fact that the Adobe Acrobat Reader plugin (any version) has *never* been stable in any browser on any OS (that I've used). Adobe single-handedly has made me loathe inline PDF. I much prefer Mac FF's behavior of downloading the file into my Downloads directory and opening it with the application of my choosing. Preview works really well and it opens the PDF faster (or at least in the same time) than Safari does inline and has more functionality.

An additional bonus is that most of the PDFs I click on are longer articles that I want to read or datasheets for electrical parts. I have the benefit after my browsing of having all of those files already downloaded and waiting for me. It does mean that I have to clean out my Downloads more often, though.

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I just finished sending Mozilla feedback on FF3, and very negative feedback it was too. i find the FF3 interface even more unusable than FF2.
Anyway, Safari is my browser of choice because it works with the OS. It uses standard OS X technologies, and has a completely standard interface (apart from the [lack of] pill button... grrr). Everything I expect to work works, and the animations are as useable as possible. Other browsers either a) try to have lots of features but lack the subtle, basic ones and/or b) have a terrible interface. Camino is the only third-party browser I find useable.

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I made a table recently, and the outcome is that Opera was very nice, but had no keychain integration and REFUSED to send any RSS feed to my default registered application. Then Camino has at least SOME keychain integration... it stores password but not certificates... I mean, WTF!? I also got annoyed with Camino constantly wanteing to update my site password even though I was not changing my password on the page I was on. Nothing works as well as Opera for mouse gestures, Firefox has plugins to (almost) remedy all inadequacies at the cost of performance. Safari is lean for exactly that reason as well and integrates nicely with KeyChain (wouldn't you know it!?) In the end of using Flock, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Safari, Camino I have to rate them: With Firefox 2 (and 3)(although it still glaringly lacks Keychain support) is still the best choice for me. I'll switch to Firefox 3 once they sort out the tab saving problem. Safari Camino Firefox Opera Features mouse gestures No No With Plugin Yes script blocking With Plugin No With Plugin Yes wildcard popup allow Yes No No No uses keychain Yes Yes (with bugs) No No Site Compatibility Medium Perfect Perfect Medium Speed Fast Fast Slow Fast Footprint Medium Medium Large Small Saves TABS No Medium Medium/Perfect Perfect Displays many TABS Poor Poor Medium/Perfect Perfect D/L manager No No Plugin Yes Force single window No Yes With Plugin Yes RSS to Mail.app Yes Yes Yes No Flashblock No Yes With Plugin No Google Bookmarks No No Yes No Middle-click Tab close No No Yes Yes Acid3 75 53 53 62

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argh, please ignore this crappy post and see my fixed table further on.

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I love Safari: it is super fast and clean, and I use .mac to sync my bookmarks to multiple machines and an iPhone.

But I also love FireBug, so I use Firefox for development.

I write my pages mostly in Coda, which uses the WebKit engine for preview. I have never found an instance where it didn't look exactly like Safari.

Most of my clients use IE6 and IE7, so I always have both open (in two separate, 'pure' Parallels VMs--yeah, I have a ton of RAM).

And from there, it is not much extra work to also test Opera, FF and Safari for Windows.

The most difficult thing to test, actually, is older versions of Safari. I have a 10.4 machine under my desk, but no 10.3 machines.

oliver



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I made a table recently, and the outcome is that Opera was very nice, but had no keychain integration and REFUSED to send any RSS feed to my default registered application. Then Camino has at least SOME keychain integration... it stores password but not certificates... I mean, WTF!? I also got annoyed with Camino constantly wanteing to update my site password even though I was not changing my password on the page I was on. Nothing works as well as Opera for mouse gestures, Firefox has plugins to (almost) remedy all inadequacies at the cost of performance. Safari is lean for exactly that reason as well and integrates nicely with KeyChain (wouldn't you know it!?) In the end of using Flock, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Safari, Camino I have to rate them: With Firefox 2 (and 3)(although it still glaringly lacks Keychain support) is still the best choice for me. I'll switch to Firefox 3 once they sort out the tab saving problem.

			Safari		Camino		Firefox		Opera
Features				

mouse gestures		No		No   		With Plugin	Yes
script blocking		With Plugin	No		With Plugin	Yes
wildcard popup allow	Yes		No		No		No
uses keychain		Yes		Yes (with bugs)	No		No
Site Compatibility	Medium		Perfect		Perfect		Medium
Speed			Fast		Fast		Slow		Fast
Footprint		Medium		Medium		Large		Small
Saves TABS		No		Medium		Medium/Perfect	Perfect
Displays many TABS	Poor		Poor		Medium/Perfect	Perfect
D/L manager		No		No		Plugin		Yes
Force single window	No		Yes		With Plugin	Yes
RSS to Mail.app		Yes		Yes		Yes		No
Flashblock		No		Yes		With Plugin	No
Google Bookmarks	No		No		Yes		No
Middle-click Tab close	No		No		Yes		Yes
Acid3			75		53		53		62

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You list script blocking in safari that can be done with a plugin. What about the other features you said No to that can also be done with a plugin?

Force single window
Saves Tabs
Flashblock

You've even got 3rd party utils to add Google Bookmarks and D/L managers. Doing a basic search returns a bookmark applet you can use to add the current site to google bookmarks.

Middle-click to close a tab seems redundant when you have a close icon on each tab or you can use ctrl-w.

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I vacillate between Safari and Camino. I've been using Safari more lately—the find improvements are nice, and I think it has slightly better text rendering in general. But Camino is very strong.

Firefox…I recognize its benefits, and I do use it for webdev stuff, but for everyday browsing the forms widgets and chrome (even under FF3 with a Mac-ish theme) are slightly off, and it bugs me unreasonably.

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I really like where FF3 is going, but like others noted, it's not stable enough to use it as my primary browser. I absolutely LOVE a lot of things in Opera, but it lacks severely in the OS integration department. So Safari it is, and I must say that 3 was a big improvement -- faster, more stable, gets the job done.

I'm not considering other clients, although I briefly flirted with Shiira.

If I'm not on a Mac it's Firefox or Opera.

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Firefox is my main browser for one reason: speed. Yes, Safari renders a page faster, but with Firefox, I can block ads and scripts through addons. The real world experience is much better with these features.

Yes, I miss some of the autofill and spotlight integration in Safari, but its not enough to pull me away from the security and personalization of Firefox.

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You can block ads and scripts with Safari add-ons too, so what's the difference...?

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You need a plugin to block scripts? What scripts are you talking about?

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It used to be Firefox on the PC, all the way from the first release. Anything compared to IE was a revelation! However, since becoming a Mac convert, Safari has slowly won me over with it's general speed and responsiveness. That I got adblocking working with it made it the perfect choice. FF3.0 looks good, but it'll have to be good to sway me!

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I really don't want this to sound like flamebait, but seriously--OmniWeb is the king of the browsers. It doesn't need plugins because it already has everything one needs. I've tried _all_ the others and always come back to OmniWeb, for so many reasons. The current versions of Firefox (3.x) and Camino are more efficient with memory but both still have massive deficiencies with system integration and interface quirks.

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I'm with the last poster! I've tried most OS X browsers and in the end I payed(!) for OmniWeb, even though there are really good ones for free! OmniWeb is my default since the early days of OS X and has so many pro features you wouldn't even find as a FF plugin and there are LOTS of them...

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I've tried them all, and I always come back to Firefox, for its widespread use and abundance of add-ons. Sure they don't all work right, but once you find the ones you love, you can't go without them. I keep trying to go back to Safari, but Apple is just too slow implementing the features I love in FF. By the time they're in Safari, I'm onto something else.

I think Safari seems faster, but only slightly.

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whoever voted for IE, please comment. I just need to know.

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I did not vote for IE but I understand why some people voted for it. Simply, it is the ONLY browser that really WORKS.

I have been using MAC for ~ 5 years now, switching from Windows because I got tired of Norton, McAffee Anti Virus constantly demanding for money.

But having said that, I like MAC OS for its simplicity and reliability, one thing about the MAC that disappoints me is that none of the browswes running on the Mac really works (until firefox3), none of them can offer the same functionality like IE, especially the convoluted Safari.

I have persevered with the MAC, supported it because I hope that sooner or later it will catch on with Windows on the browser war. But at the moment, it is still light years behind.

Btw, I even bought OmniWeb soon after I bought my PowerBook 17" simply I had no choice. But then OmniWeb is still not perfect, it has so many shortcominngs.


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Can you mention what makes IE so much better and Safari (or others) so much worse?

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I would not like to get into the religious war about the browsers and I did not say that IE was much nicer. I said that it was the only browser that worked for now. It can be attributed to the fact that the business and most the web developers out there use the MS proprietary technology such as Active X. I know that is the pain on the neck for the people who fight for the standard (but what the standard anyway).



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Can you also mention why you insist on spelling Mac in all capital letters?

[[It's been ages since I came across a website which actually required ActiveX.]]

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> Can you also mention why you insist on spelling Mac in all capital letters?

This is an interesting (funny) question. I have never thought about how I spell a "Mac", but does it really matter? This is my way and I do it whatever way I like.

This question reminds me of some countries where I used to live and work. In these countries, people are taught to memorize things, to follow the rules down to some trivial matters. As a result of this kind of education, there is very little original thinking despite a large percentage of educated population.


> [[It's been ages since I came across a website which actually required ActiveX.]]

Well, I think that you probably use your browser for general browsing. There are lots of institutions out there where the only reasonable way to remotely access their systems is though IE and some Active X scripts (VPN is not allowed). Of course, you can use FF (Safari) + Java but it does not work well.

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This could get interesting. Know any deep thought discussion forums out there?

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I just realised why "MAC" annoys me so much more than, say, "Ipod". MAC ≠ Mac.

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I think the you- the original reply meant in the first comment IE for windows, which is awesome, we mean mac, ie for mac is terrible and dead

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I think the you- the original reply meant in the first comment IE for windows, which is awesome, we mean mac, ie for mac is terrible and dead

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Correct!

Who is in the right mind using the old ie for mac?

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I love Shiira's simiplicity, speed and the fact that it supports Growl notifications when a download is complete. And it has the option to sort downloads into folders by date, the same way Stand for Safari can. My biggest complaint with it is the inability to restore all tabs/windows from the previous session. Since it tends to crash when trying to connect to FTP sites for downloads, this can be very annoying to recreate each tab individually after a restart. Can't completely replace Safari with it yet but soon...

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I shall echo the sentiments of the others who mentioned it: OmniWeb is the greatest browser the world has ever known. Two features that really stand out for me: vertical tabs in a drawer, and site-specific preferences.

For the first, it's very nice to be able to have a ludicrous number of tabs open in one window (I currently have twenty!) with every single one of them visible. The second feature is invaluable when you run across a site that has text that's either too small or too big or glaringly obnoxious ads. If you haven't tried it out, I urge you to try it. It's easily worth the $15 Omni charges.

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What about Netscape Navigator? Has it been forgotten? I use it occasionally, but I know lot of people like it.

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Nope. It's been killed.

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I dumped FF2 because it was so bad and went to Safari but I am back to Firefox because FF3 is super.

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OmniWeb is the best. I've used it for many years. It handles large numbers of tabs open simultaneously. Its fairly reliable. It renders well (with a few problems). Its very customisable. I also use Safari, Flock, Opera, iCab for different purposes. I don't actually like Firefox much: its ugly and Flock is nicer and can use most FF plug-ins.

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Since I use Firefox together with the Web Developer extension, the development of web applications become much more easy. Otherwise I love the speed of Safari, but still I gave my vote for Firefox.

However I am sure that, if there would be a similar extension for Safari, like Web Developer for Firefox, than I would go for that pair.

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Has everyone forgotten WebKit it should be up there

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WebKit = Safari. If you use WebKit, you're really using Safari, except it's a version that hasn't been released yet.

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Yeah but technically you're not because Safari is the user interface, WebKit is under the hood, close, but different

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I didn't include any beta browsers -- for the purposes of this poll, WebKit = Safari, as that's the UI you've chosen to use. (And Firefox 3 = Firefox, etc. for other beta releases).

And yes, the reply above this is correct: WebKit = Safari in terms of UI, but WebKit ≠ Future versions of Safari. WebKit is only "under the hood" improvements, whereas future releases of Safari will include (probably) UI improvements and new features.

-rob.

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What a debacle for Camino!

In browser war #8 last year there was a 25.74% share for Camino, this year's share reduced to only 6.43%!
Will Camino vanish with the release of Firefox 3?

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