I’ve been saying for years that Safari is a better day-today browser for the typical Mac user than Firefox — largely because of it’s glorious text rendering. Nice to see the Z agrees. That having been said, there’s no doubt that Firefox has some available development tools (Firebug, in particular), that makes it a must-have for the web developer. Also, Safari still sucks at Javascript, compared to FF.
001 // Ville Säävuori // 11.27.2006 // 3:14 PM
I’ve been using Safari since Panther, but just a couple of months back I switched to Firefox.
Safari has no support for sessions, no ad-blocking features and the plugin-api is terrible. At least for me, when I get all the (mostly non-free) addons that I need for it, the browser gets very, very slow and unresponsive.
With Firefox I get all the cool shit — for free.
002 // Jeff Croft // 11.27.2006 // 3:33 PM
Ville-
If you want “all the cool shit,” then you don’t qualiy as a “typical Mac user.” Firefox is certainly more extensible, and if that’s more important to you than quality text rendering, that’s cool. But, I think the “typical Mac user,” as I said, is better served by Safari.
(Myself, I use Safari with Saft for the sessions and ad block — and don’t seem to have any slowness because of it. But, you mileage definitely may vary.)
003 // Michael Whalen // 11.28.2006 // 2:39 AM
I am a PC Switcher (and yes, I still love PC’s and will always love them, but totally love Mac’s now) and used Firefox for years, so naturally that is what I use on OS X.
Safari is a good browser, but really the only benefit over Firefox (to me) is the good looking form elements. And yes, you may be thinking “Well then get Camino, its Firefox with the great looks of Safari (Cocoa)”, but Camino lacks extension support (Web Dev Toolbar, helloooo).
I’ll stick with Firefox for now. :)