Safari or Firefox?
When I was a Windows user I went through several generations of browsers. Starting off with Mosaic, then on to Netscape Navigator and finally, since I was a hard core MS guy, Internet Explorer. Of course back then we called the early versions Internet Exploder because the thing would frequently crash in spectacular ways. Over time Internet Explorer improved and became fairly stable, though it had a huge number of security holes that Microsoft could never seem to get on top of.Once Internet Explorer became the defacto standard on the Windows platform Microsoft stopped innovating on it and focused on fixing security issues. It was about this time that Mozilla put out the first versions of Firefox and suddenly I had a reason to consider something other than IE. Firefox was quick, had a tabbed interface that IE didn't, didn't have the security holes that IE had and was, for the most part, able to present most web pages just as well as IE.
I quickly adopted Firefox as my default browser and for the next couple of years watched as Microsoft slowly realized that they needed to put a lot of effort into their new browser. Firefox always seemed to be one step ahead of IE, adding great new capabilities like skinning, plugins and extensions that were really handy.
Enough Windows History - What About Mac?
When I switched to Mac I figured I would also use Firefox instead of Safari. It was actually the very first application I installed on my new Mac. After playing with both I was surprised to find myself using Safari as my default browser. My use of Firefox was limited to my development work where some of the extensions for Firefox come in handy and the XML viewer that's built in makes life much easier.
What didn't I like about Firefox? It was considerably slower than Safari when loading and rendering web pages. The UI did not feel Mac like, with a toolbar that looked like something from an older Windows application. I love the clean, crisp UIs that Apple produces and while some think that Safari is spartan, I think it's just clean and uncluttered.
Firefox also rendered form components on a web page very differently than Safari. While Safari's pulldown lists and buttons inside a web form looked just like any other Mac UI, the Firefox versions of those buttons looked like something from an old Windows 98 machine; square, gray, flat buttons.
Out Comes Firefox 3.0
The recent release of Firefox 3.0 meant that I wanted to check this out again and see if Firefox deserved a spot as my default browser. I installed it over my previous version and started playing around.
Note: If you are a 1Password fan like I am you will need to open the preferences in it and reset it in the Browsers section.
The first thing I noticed is that it is considerably faster than the previous version. I didn't do hard core testing—just some subjective stuff—but found it to be nearly as fast as Safari. The UI has also been updated, making it look much more like a traditional Mac application. I particularly like the tab and toolbar rendering:
I also found that the web forms that Firefox used to generate are now being presented with traditional OS X looking components. This was a big deal for me so I was quite happy to see that in 3.0.
The Firefox team also added a cool searching feature. Click on the down arrow just on the right side of the address box and up pops your standard list of recent addresses. If you begin to type any matches found—both from your history and your bookmarks—appear in the list. It's kind of like a browser specific Spotlight search. Very cool.
There are three key Safari features that I don't have in Firefox though:
1) Dictionary Lookup
2) Drag and drop in web file upload forms
3) Snapback
Of these only Dictionary Lookup is tough to live without for me. Given the advances that Firefox has made I am going to spend the next week playing with this browser to see if it can indeed become my default. Using it for the bulk of the day yesterday leads me to think it has a pretty good chance.
Comments
You can also enable a more safari-like way to view PDf (directly into the browser) with this extension.
With this skin, and this extension, I've now switched back to firefox as default web browser on my Mac.
I see there is one now, so maybe I should try migrating the other way. Unfiltered web makes my eyes bleed.
Form entry on Safari is page specific & the last entry is entered in the form with the drop down list. All I have to do is type the first letter and then click the button or hit return.
Firefox gives you a drop down menu, leaving the form field blank. You then have to cursor through ALL form entries beginning with that letter, or just continue typing - then click the button or hit return.
That to me alone is enough to use Safari.
PithHelmet is available since quite a long time, and does a great job in adfiltering.
Now that Firefox 3.0 is out (and even when it was in RC), I switched to Firefox as my main browser. AdBlock Plus is the only way to go for blocking obnoxious ads and other extensions like the dictionary ones mentioned in prior comments make FF3.0 pretty much Safari like.
I have some problems with FF3.0 that will hopefully be resolved as time goes on. One is for some reason loading Gmail in the browser causes the web mail client to display half way down the page. I have had to remove quite a bit of filters to get Gmail to fit in the browser window with no scrollbars.
I find it interesting that FF3.0 is a Cocoa based app now, but it doesn't support the keyboard shortcut for the dictionary.
So far so good with FF3.0, I'll keep using it until it does something really obnoxious, but that hasn't happened yet, so good for Mozilla for fixing FF so that it's a very viable browser for us Mac users.
Non-techie Mac-user
More standards-compliant than Firefox, more stable than Firefox, and more functionality than Safari.
http://www.apple.com
Select the text above and click and drag it onto the Tab Bar (or the Address Bar itself).
This one, however, was a very tricky one. You should take note of the following method, however. When you detect a problem, create a new account (I call it Test) on my machines and see if you can reproduce the problem in it. If you can't, you can narrow it down to your Home directory.
In my case, the non-working Dictionary Lookup was due to a corrupted .plist file in ~/Library/Preferences. The problem was that it was one of the invisible files. If I remember correctly, it was .GlobalPreferences.plist. I deleted it, logged out/in, and that fixed the problem.
Firefox, Safari, and even Explorer have the first two features. As a captive app Safari integrates really well with other Apple apps and utilities, unlike Firefox and *really* unlike Opera. I keep reading hints and references to magnifying zoom in Safari and Firefox but so far at least there's no findable interface. (With Opera you option-scroll.)
Anyway, this week Opera significantly reved itself for the Mac and I'm still finding cool new improvements, but if I could learn to work magnifying zoom I, like you, would prefer to stick with Safari.
(P.S., the built in Macintosh control+scroll zoom zooms everything including menus and other open windows instead of just the client window. That's definitely no substitute.)
DTI
http://pimpmysafari.com/
Anyway, check
http://www.sanneblad.se/johan/?p=180
to see some quircks.
I can add, Preferences Pane to the list as it continues to have the old Jaguar tabs.
I continue to use Safari but i have always an use for FFox (my default on my Wintel machine). Firebug is unsurpassed and the new Javascript rendering engine is fast.
If you need some useful safari plug check
this
http://www.machangout.com/
and this
http://safariblock.googlecode.com/
Use the nightly Webkit
http://nightly.webkit.org/
David, you mention drag and drop for upload forms. Try this https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2190 add-on for Firefox. I've used it on Windows and it works fine. I've yet to try it on my 1 week old MacBook, but I will probably install it today.
I wasn't aware of the Snapback feature you mentioned in Safari, but I quickly did a search for Snapback Firefox addon and came up with https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1245
I'll have to try out this Snapback feature in both browsers. I think what I do now that is similar is keep my original web site in one tab and always open other links in new tabs. Eventually I make my way back to the original tab.
How about Camino browser? Try that? I noticed it gave me even more vertical screen real estate than both FF3 and Safari. Just ever so slightly but still, I do appreciate it. Yes, you can change font sizes and zoom out in FF3 and Safari, but I'd rather leave the browser in its default config regarding font sizes and zoom settings for some reason.
For now, I'm using FF3 with default font set at 15, we'll see how long I keep it this way. This is all relative to the screen size and resolution you are using. I'm using a 13" MacBook at the native resolution.
When I switched to Mac earlier this year, I also made the switch to Safari, but FF3 has now taken over. Firebug, Twitter, and Gmail plugin integration have made it a very versatile browswer.
http://img299.imageshack.us/img299/4498/immagine1az4.png (FFox)
to this
http://img256.imageshack.us/img256/5245/immagine2mn7.png (Safari)
I was referring to the tabs inside the panel. Sorry for being inaccurate.
Fission
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1951
Fission combines address bar and progress bar (Safari style). This makes the progress bar more visible and allows for a nice visual effect.
Also check out their sensational PicLens.
With that said, Firefox seems to handle forms better.
There are a few things that FF3 doesn't do compared to Safari, but compared to the flexibility of FF3's extensions, Safari just doesn't quite add up.