Sorry, Scott. I still choose Safari over Firefox for the bulk of my browsing
You can’t read any tech news these days without being
bombarded with the fact that Firefox is taking
the browser world by storm. Goodie for Firefox. It’s a perfectly fine browser and if I had to work on the Windows
platform all day long, it would be my sole browser, for sure. It kicks IE’s insecure, buggy ass. But on the Mac -
Safari still rules my browser kingdom.
Here’s why:
I’m a speed freak. For me (as always, your mileage may vary), Safari is still significantly faster.
And when you are accustomed to command-clicking 20+ tabs open in a matter of seconds, speed is important. Everyone I
know talks about how fast Firefox is. Faster than IE and Netscape 7 and Mozilla, sure, but it’s not as fast as Safari -
not on my machines at least.
No close widget on each tab. I often want to close tabs that aren’t active. If the tab is active, I
can command+w to close it, but if the tab isn’t active, I have to make it active before I can close it. I
hate that.
Without using an extension, the tab bar
cannot be always in place. That’s minor, but jarring when you are used to having it always
there, as I am with Safari. In Firefix, the tab bar goes away when there is only one tab open. So I downloaded
the extension. But I shouldn’t have to. It should be a preference. CORRECTION: As many
of you have pointed out in your comments, there is a preference in the current version of Firefox to keep the tab bar
in place when only one tab is open. I don’t believe that was an option in pre 1.0 versions of Firefox and I admittedly
didn’t notice it there in 1.0 until I just checked. Or maybe I’d missed it all along? Regardless, I stand corrected.
Thanks for pointing it out!
It doesn’t look like a Mac app. I don’t want to download a bunch of themes to make Firefox look like
it belong on my Mac. And frankly, I think most of those themes suck.
It doesn’t behave like a Mac app. This really annoys me… when I am in a single-line form field, the
address bar or the search box, I am accustomed to being able to use my up and down arrow buttons to jump to the
beginning or end of a text entry. Firefox ignores the up and down keys in those places. It wastes my time. Similarly,
command+up has no effect when I want to jump to the top of of page from the bottom (or middle for that matter).
I will give Firefox credit where credit is due. There are some very cool extensions you can install that enable you to
do some pretty amazing things with Firefox. And when I want or need to do those things, I switch to Firefox for that
session. Firefox also works on a handful of sites that Safari breaks with (the WIN intranet publishing backend, for
example, that I am composing this very post in)
Bottom line: For Mac OS X, I think Firefox still has a long was to go before it beats Safari. It will be a contender
one day, I’m quite sure of that, but it’s not there yet. Until it matures, Safari will remain my primary browser of
choice.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Arun said 4:16PM on 6-16-2005
One feature which Safari (Pre-Tiger) doesn't have, but Firefox does is built-in RSS. I think that's a super-cool feature which is missing on Safari, and if Firefox weren't so darned slow on my Mac, I would be using Firefox all the time...
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Holls said 4:15PM on 6-16-2005
Both, Safari and Firefox are fine pieces of Software! I think Safari is a bit faster than Firefox. The most annoying thing in Safari is that it don't save the hole page (including) when I need it (maybe someone can correct me). In Firefox I miss the Tab-Close-Button on serveral Tab insteed one Button for the highlighted Tab.
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Shaun Murray said 7:42AM on 6-22-2005
The beachballs in Safari are caused by the godawful slow auto-fill usually. Switch it off if you're on a slow Mac or have limited memory.
I guess the Safari developers aren't running on 500Mhz G3 iBooks, which is where I searched and searched for a fix for the problem. Now I'm on a G5 it's not a big deal. ;-)
I'd echo the praise for Camino. If you're going to run a Gecko based browser on a Mac, Camino wipes the floor with Firefox.
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GEAH said 4:15PM on 6-16-2005
I check eBay often and, in my experience, Safari is virtually incompatible with eBay. Searches almost always bring up the beach ball, often for what seems like an eternity. Firefox flies on eBay and seems fine everywhere else, so I'm a Firefox convert, though I'm happy to go back to Safari if Apple fixes the issues it has with eBay.
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Dan Creswell said 4:15PM on 6-16-2005
I run CodeTeks Virtual Desktop and whilst I love Firefox and would like to use it, the keyboard focus issues drive me insane. Camino doesn't suffer the same problems and thus is my default browser.
IMHO, Safari is a nice minimalist browser but it's a little short on configuration and slower than either of Firefox or Camino.
My two cents.....
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Jon Hicks said 4:15PM on 6-16-2005
It's Safari and Omniweb all the way for me. Many of Firefox's cool extensions now have an equivalent for Safari, especially with Saft. Camino is just too basic for me - current nightlies are really speedy, but it lacks so many features.
I also prefer the text rendering in Safari. I think this is because it uses Quartz rather than Quickdraw.
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ToddG said 4:15PM on 6-16-2005
I think the Mozilla rendering engine (in Firefox) is often faster, but the non-Cocoa UI of Firefox is what makes it sometimes seem slower to use. It's a shame, because I too often find myself staring at the BBOD (Windows has a Screen, we have a Beachball) often, especially on large pages or after using form-heavy pages (that's when it doesn't just crash on form-heavy pages).
And I wish Safari released more often, but I guess being from Apple they can't do the release-early, release-often routine. I would guess (please please please) that the next released Safari will be quite improved. I sure hope so at least. Or Apple sends me a free G5 PowerMac. Hmmm.
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Micah said 4:15PM on 6-16-2005
If Opera didn't crash more often than a blind drunk driver, it would be my default browser. Safari is my default, however. I hate how firefox leaves all these windows media files on my desktop. In safari, it is deleted after I watch them. Both safari & firefox need to do some more work on their respective pop-up blockers. Here recently, i've started to feel like I'm surfing in the old-days. I've been getting these pop-ups pretty darn frequently. Opera is the only one that blocks them all.
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PXLated said 4:15PM on 6-16-2005
I agree 100%. And by the time Firefox matures, we'll have new versions of Safari.
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Paul Hoffman said 4:15PM on 6-16-2005
Here's another "me too". Mozilla feels like a cool Windows app ported to the Mac. Good, and not as good as Safari.
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Ben M said 4:15PM on 6-16-2005
Yeah, I've stuck with Safari too, even though I use Firefox at work (it's definitely the best browser on Windows). Regarding your third point, though, there IS a preference to keep the tab bar in place. Look in Tabbed Browsing in the Advanced section. Thank God, too, because I HATE having it there when there's only one tab ;).
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Matthom said 4:15PM on 6-16-2005
I agree with all of your arguments for Safari. But there's one thing that still keeps me using Firefox. Keyword bookmarks. Safari does not have that. I am a keyboard freak, and I like to type single, short words, which takes me to sites that would be a pain to remember - or find the right bookmark.
Like, if I can't remember a certain guitar tab site's address, I just use 'guitar' as my keyword, and that's all I ever have to remember.
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robert said 4:15PM on 6-16-2005
In Firefox for OS, I have the tab bar available even with just one tab. I didn't need an extension, it's just a configurable option..
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Nick! said 4:15PM on 6-16-2005
I'm stepping into Appledom shortly, and ultimately I would like to use Safari. I use Firefox now and the one extension I'm all about is Adblock. Is there something comparible to the Adblock extension that's for Safari?
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Travis said 4:15PM on 6-16-2005
Have you given Camino a spin?
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/camino/
Like Firefox, it's based on the Mozilla engine, but for some reason, I can't seem to get into Firefox, whereas Camino is fast and always seems to do what I expect when it comes to keyboard shortcuts and window interactions.
Maybe it's because Camino was built specifically for Macintosh.
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Jesse Wilson said 4:15PM on 6-16-2005
My main complaints in regards to Safari stem from it's lack of preferences that go beyond even the most basic of settings. I can set web pages opened from external apps to load in a new tab, but I can't extend that to new windows opened by web pages. Cookie blocking is too limited. Auto-fill is limited as well, in that editing only means the ability to remove. Then there's the one-size-fits-all approach to the toolbar.
I love Safari, but I can't help but notice that your complaints against Firefox are almost purely cosmetic, while Safari is lacking in some areas that it should not be.
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paul said 4:15PM on 6-16-2005
Camino is a lot better than Safari, IMHO. I just wish it would work better with Flash. Try the latest nightly build, though, especially if brushed metal makes you want to puke.
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Gary Marshall said 12:12PM on 11-25-2005
Safari isn't an ideal everyday browser - I've moved to Firefox because there are still sites that don't work with Safari. They either don't load at all, or they have form list boxes that you can't click in Safari - something that's particularly common with online shopping sites.
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Brandon said 2:31PM on 12-13-2005
I use Safari at home on my Mac, but I work on my PC I use Firefox exclusively. I think I stick with Safari because Firefox runs so ungodly slow on my machine for some reason.
At any rate, I thought I'd mention that there is also a third-party extension that provides close widgets on each tab in Firefox. I've used it on my machine at work for so long that I'd forgotten that it's not a built-in capability.
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Krioni said 4:15PM on 6-16-2005
OmniWeb. Bought it, love it. Site-specific preferences and ad-blocking. Quit the app, relaunch - all your windows re-open. With many browsers, it's as if what you were doing when you quit (or accidentally quit, or crashed) was totally worthless. Ever hit command-Q (right next to command-W) when trying to close a single window, and now all the 15 pages you had loaded are GONE? I actually used to modify Safari so that Quit was control-command-Q to avoid this. Doesn't help with crashes, though. For that I had an AppleScript that saved all the currently-loaded URLs every minute. Now, I just use OmniWeb.
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