OS X: Safari or Firefox

Posted on Feb 10, 2007 - 10:49 AM Comments (0)

For as long as I have been using OS X, about 4 years, I have always used Safari. I never had many complaints with the browser and it is very fast! Recently I have been annoyed with Safari not rendering certain pages correctly. I know that Safari is W3C compliant and the real issue is the code used on the page in question, but still it can be annoying.

Many of my friends are suggesting Firefox. While I am no stranger to Firefox on the PC or even *nix (FreeBSD, Linux) I have yet to try it on OS X. Yea, seriously. So I decided to give it a shot.

I immediately noticed it is slower than Safari. I was willing to live with that since it seemed to render all pages correctly. Even the broken pages that Safari had a bit of trouble with. Everything was all to the good, until I noticed some quirks that made me reconsider.

Firefox seems to crash at random. Usually after it has been running for a day or so and I have just visited one or two sites with heavy use of Java (read: Web 2.0)
Sometimes the keyboard doesn't respond in Firefox. For instance, I can't scroll using the space bar or the arrow keys. Another example, if I type in a URL, hitting return does not cause Firefox to load the web page. I have to click the "go" button. As a UNIX geek, I really hate "clicking" when I don't have to ;)
After a day or so of use Firefox gets very sluggish. Taking 10 seconds or more to just BEGIN loading a web page.

I did a little searching and decided to go back to Safari for most tasks. Firefox 3 looks like it will be more fit for OS X, as the current version is more of a quick port with lots of missing OS X interoperability.

Note: I did try Camino as well. I was impressed with it. It does seem a little behind Safari and even Firefox in some aspects. Also, it appears under developed. Not sure how active the team is over there.

Technorati Tags: firefox, OS X, safari, software

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