After experiencing the same issues with Firefox in Mac OSX as I had previously encountered under Windows, about a week ago I switched from using Firefox to Safari full time. Unfortunately something in the WordPress code doesn’t work in Safari so I’m using Firefox on occasion, but only for writing posts.
Short version: love it.
Safari 3 under OS X is quick, it renders pages nicely and it is a total pleasure to work with.
But it has limitations.
For starters, there isn’t the plugins available for Safari as there is with Firefox. You also cant customise certain features, for example I’m not a fan of how it deals with an overflow of tabs; in Firefox I can reduce the tab size and fit a whole lot more on a line.
So how does one get Apple to make Safari better?
I suppose the question may have a similar answer to how do you get Mozilla to make Firefox more stable and less of a memory hog?…both are probably impossible, but I’m open to suggestions. Also if anyone has any recommendations for Safari plugins, I’ve noticed a few about but haven’t tried any yet.
Hi Duncan,
Check out Pimp My Safari – http://pimpmysafari.com/ for list of plugins for Safari. Personally, I only use Saft for Safari.
Duncan,
I have used Safari 3.0 in Windows (written about the experience a couple of time) and if it wasn’t for a couple of other issues besides the WP issue you mentioned I waould be using it fulltime as well. I’m not a big user of add-ins or plugins for browsers so that isn’t so important .. on the whole though I would probably switch from IE to it before using FF.
For me, Safari is my #1 browser on both platforms. It’s light, and runs just about everything I need it to. Every once in a while, I find a poorly coded site that just so happens to run better in FireFox, but the creeping extension bloat was the #1 reason I turned away from FireFox in the first place. It got too big and too slow. I don’t really need to look to my FireFox to run my iTunes or show me the day’s weather after all.
There are a few plugins that I use on Firefox that I would struggle to run without now.
I also gave up on Safari 2 because it would crash unexpectedly ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù at least Firefox, if crashes, can open up all the tabs again, even with unsaved form contents still in place. I guess if it has to crash or hang, it’s near ideal at recovering.
The biggest improvement for Firefox would be to make it fully multi-threaded so that if one tab hangs, the whole browser doesn’t freeze up. That’s the biggest time waster. I can put up with Firefox taking twice the time to load or being X% slower if it didn’t freeze every now and then with larger / more complex pages. True multi-threading would majorly improve performance on the multi-core machines too.
It’s all about plugins. Apple will never endorse them – it breaks their control over the experience. Nothing they want less than people saying Safari leaks memory like crazy or that it’s unstable when a plugin is at fault.
So I too am stuck with FF. Adblock, Flashblock, Nuke Anything, Firebug … too good to give up.
Yes i am using Safari 3 under OS X it is really quick as you told i like this one very much.
Yes i am using Safari 3 under OS X it is really quick as you told i like this one very much.
Yes i am using Safari 3 under OS X it is really quick as you told i like this one very much.