Firefox or Safari?

I think that I'm getting the hang of this Mac after almost two months of tinkering.

Question: Which is better? Firefox or Safari?

I've used both and I feel a little more comfortable with Firefox, but since Safari is an Apple product am I better off using it?

Teacher

 

Camino beats them both IMO

 

My personal preference...

Safari > Camino > FF

FF crashes too much, and takes too long to open.

Safari opens instantly and the find function is far superior.

 

I use FF for some reason, can't explain it. Safari is faster and more stable. However, FF does work with more sites. Since FF 2.0 though, it has been nothing but a headache.

 

I really don't like Safari. It's just personal preference, some things about it just rub me the wrong way. If we had the same Firefox as for windows, then Firefox would dominate, but as we have a different version, there's many issues. There's still a huge memory leak problem with firefox(open up firefox and just let it sit on your homepage over night, then check your ram usage with iStat or Amnesia), it's really pretty slow, and a couple of other things.

So if it's just between Firefox and Safari, go for Safari. Otherwise look at:

Camino
Shiira
Opera
Omniweb (this is the all out best, but it costs $15).

 

I use FF because I can use foxmarks to sync it on any machine I am using, be it home or office, portable FF on a USB, windows or mac...

until I can do that with another browser, there's no way I would use anything else

 

It's not quite the same thing, but you could use del.icio.us

 

opera has become my favorite

 

FWIW, Firefox on Windows is not much better these days. 2.x has been pretty much a disaster for them. I really hope Firefox 3 is better.

 

Safari by a long shot for me.

 

I am using safari now. I do not have any problem

 

Hmmmm! Thanks

 

Strange to read your thoughts here. My experience is exactly opposite. For instance, using Safari at NBR is impossible for me because it's so slow. Often, it just won't open a page at all.

 

Safari > Camino > Shiira > Firefox for me.

I've grown to like the Safari interface. I was critical at first about the lack of favicons next to bookmarks, but now I rather like how there's no distracting favicon so I can focus more on the actual webpage.

I still think the brushed metal is a little heavy though.

 

safari for me

its wierd but safari works better/faster then firefox on internal pages for work. and most of the pages are designed to be ie/firefox compatible.

 

Oh, one thing though. Safari still isn't supported by Google Spreadsheets, so I'm forced to use Firefox when I use that.

 

Firefox all the way. Thats my primary browser on both Windows and OS X.

 

You could try some these Mac OS X optimized Firefox builds; on mozillazine some Mac OS X users swear by this.

 

Interesting comments. I'd been using FF, but will have to give some of the other contenders here a try.

 

FF for sure. Safari doesnt work for me due to lack of tabs and of course not all sites work on it.

 

Safari has Tabs. Safari --> Preferences --> Tabs.

 

As Xander said, Safari does have tabbed browsing. Both Safari 2 and Safari 3 Beta have tabbed browsing. Its just not enabled by default. Follow Xander's instructions to enable tabbed browsing in Safari.

 

FF for me too. I use Yahoo Mail and the beta version doesn't work properly for me on any other browser. Also I like certain add ons (No Script, ABP & Tabbrowser preferences<- last one doesn't work on my Macbook though) which I'm accustomed to so I guess I've just become stuck in my ways!

 

I'm surprised more of you dont use opera. It takes alittle to get used to, but now i love it. The load times are great, and i like the tabbing system along with the speeddial

 

Opera is a great browser. Personally though, I don't like its heavy emphasis on Aqua.

 

It is one of the quicker browsers out there, but a lot of stuff wont display on it for some reason. Which is odd, because I believe it runs on gecko...

 

I havent run into much trouble displaying pages with opera. What sort of pages havent loaded for you under opera?

 

According to Wikipedia, Opera uses the Presto layout engine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presto_(layout_engine)

Interesting though...when I randomly use Opera, I don't notice any webpage issues.

 

one thing i really like about opera is how you can zoom in and out to where the cursor is, by pressing 0 or 9. Does safari have this?

 

Oops .. didnt know this. I did try Safari 3 beta but it screwed up my dashboard and had to uninstall. Will try the tabbed thing in Safari 2.

 

I use safari on my Mac and firefox on my pc's. I think safari feels more "Macish". I don't know, i just don't want the experiences to be the same. Weird I know. Plus safari seems to work quicker/better in OSX than FF.

 

If you like the way Firefox works but want a more Mac theme, you may want to look at Camino if you haven't already, Eallan.

 

For me: Omniweb > Shiira > Camino > Safari > Firefox > Opera > MSIE 7 in Fusion (sad that I have all those installed eh)

smiley_lauf posted a great link to a comparison of OSX browsers. Most of the big ones were already listed above, but there are quite a few in there that are quite good.

http://darrel.knutson.com/mac/www/browsers.html

Doesn't have much in the way of reviews of them, but it's a great place to start to find the perfect browser (of course you'll have to wade through all 200+ of them)

 

What is so intriguing about OmniWeb, Taelrak? I find the cost to be a huge annoyance.

 

The cost does put a damper on it, but then even Opera was a pay/adware browser for several years.

As for good points - here goes:

1. Vertical Tab Bar with thumbnails
2. Workspaces that allow you to snapshot multiple sessions in a combination of tabs and windows that are easily draggable and organizable automatically
3. Regular expressions for searches
4. Quick-shortcut creation from search fields
5. Actually having keyword shortcuts in the first place (see #4 above)
6. great integration with OSX
7. Zoom actually works properly (i.e. fits to page, doesn't maximize to full screen)
8. Site-specific preferences
9. easy bookmark synching with WebDav or .Mac
10. auto-check of bookmarks that changed (like a semi-RSS feed)
11. easy way to change options for autofill security locations
12. good support with regular updates - support team will actually get back to you when you submit those generic crash reports (and before anyone asks, it crashed because I was testing an alpha release )
13. good integration of speech recognition and text-to-speech
14. very easy to list all links/images/etc. of a web page and save them
15. it's pretty fast
16. scroll-speed is FAST! (even faster than whatever you set OSX to scroll at)
17. some useful options for text fields (i.e. I can open up this textbox i'm typing in into an editor automatically, and it'll just import/export the text back into the NBR quick-reply box automatically). This lets you do more things like print what you're typing and offers some means of protection against losing what you typed, import text from files directly, etc.
18. also works with certain proprietary cites better than most (although with some customization).

Anyway, there are more. Obviously many of the features listed are shared with firefox, shiira, safari, etc. However, its strength is that none of the other browsers has ALL those features together, although you can get firefox to surpass it with add-ons of course (but firefox in OSX is icky).

That said, there are a number of things that it doesn't have (shiira's tab expose, firefox's inline find, it takes a decent amount of memory and cpu power--especially if you have multiple workspaces open and many websites set to autocheck at the same time, and certain javascript functions don't work right). Given the entire package though, I love it.

 

Which is why I never used Opera .

 

Cool, how did you figure this out? I was trying CTRL+ to zoom in, but for some reason this did not work...no wonder.

 

[Off topic]

smiley_lauf, I just noticed you've been registered to NBR for over two years! That's longer than I have been here!

[/Off Topic]

 

OFF TOPIC: Yes, Sam, excellent vision! I registered when I was a doctoral student in US. I have since then been away from an INTERNET connection, hence the lag in posts. When I am in US (like now) for work related visits, I try to get back to my addictive forum habits.

 

I have just looked at Omni, looks great Love the Tab bit. Gonna give it a try.


Nice tip!!!!

 

Yep, it has a 15-day free trial, so no reason not to.

Although...if you just like the vertical tab bar, Shiira has a similar one now.

 

Firefox because of its extensions. Was contemplating Opera but there were many features in Firefox extensions that weren't available as Opera widgets. On the other hand, Opera's speed dial, zooming and other nice features can easily be mimicked with Firefox extensions. Safari is nice but doesn't offer much beyond a basic web browser.

 

Hmm, well my main two computers are a XP and Vista machine, but my wife has a Powerbook Pro. I have Firefox on all three. Yes I agree that it does take longer to start up, but the extensions are for me, and my wife, priceless.

Hmm, well I have had FF crash on me a couple of times, and it does have a bit of a memory leak problem, but overall I think it is rather solid and I haven't had hardly any problems with it.

 

I wish this had been a poll.

I use Safari. FF used to be my fave, but just didn't deliver as well as Safari after I switched to Mac.

 

I liked it so much i bought i

 

Maybe its just me, but I have no extensions on Firefox...I don't find the need for them.

 

As I switched to Mac a couple of months ago, I have tried Safari, FF, Opera and Camino. So far I use FF the most as it lets me sync my bookmarks with my Windows machines. I liked Safari at first but it tends to randomly crash on my MB. Opera worked well too, but I rarely ever use it even in Windows. Camino seems to be the 'prettiest' of them all... but the rendering engine is the same as FF so I use FF as I use a few extensions.

 

Yeah, Safari 3 Beta crashed on me quite a lot at first...it hasn't happened lately though. Good thing.

 

I still using Safari 2, not sure if I should give Safari 3 a shot.

 

I like some of Safari 3's new features...they're not noticeable at first but you find them later on.

And Safari 3 Beta's been pretty stable now, I wouldn't worry about it crashing all the time. But its worth noting that MSN Messenger for Mac doesn't work with Safari 3 Beta.