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Breathe new life into OS X Safari

5thirtyone.com — Add functionality to OS X Safari. Firefox hasn't won the the browser war yet and the following examples offer functionality to rival that found in Firefox's range of available extensions.

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  • puneypunk, on 10/12/2007, -75/+3Doesn't change the fact it stinks of KDE :P

    EWWWW!
    • isdereks, on 10/12/2007, -47/+8KDE doesn't have that bad of a "stink" ;)
    • danglerman, on 10/12/2007, -55/+14so, here's the deal ;) Safari looks nice (cocoa interface), but at the end of the day, people are just going to use Firefox
    • MikeSD34, on 10/12/2007, -3/+61Actually if anything, people will use Safari or Camino at the end of the day because they have native OSX interfaces, where as Firefox doesn't. The only real reason to use Firefox over Camino is the extensions, and some of us don't care much about those.
    • dclowd9901, on 10/12/2007, -16/+26"Doesn't change the fact it stinks of KDE :P

      EWWWW!"

      You're kidding me. There's even sects within the Linux cult?

      Just when I thought I was going to try putting Linux on my home machine tonight. Get a life, guys.
    • l0ne, on 10/12/2007, -9/+16No. There's just the KDE people, and then everyone else.
      Except for the Enlightenment guys. They're just strange.
      :)
    • MattL920, on 10/12/2007, -9/+94Don't be silly, nobody who uses linux has sects
    • rickcarson, on 10/12/2007, -3/+24Currently I use Firefox at work and Safari at home.

      Safari wins hands down.

      The main thing I miss on Firefox is the keyboard navigation between tabs. They've got most of the other keyboard shortcuts I need (Ctrl-N for new window, Ctrl-T for new tab, Ctrl-W to close the current tab).

      Safari's Cmd-Shift-] and Cmd-Shift-[ for the win.
      (nb: used to be left and right arrow instead of [ and ] in earlier versions of OSX/Safari)

      One of the nice things about OS X compared to windows is that if they give you a menu command, but don't specify shortcut keys you can go and make them yourself.
    • afrazkhan, on 10/12/2007, -8/+10Uhm, actually there's the Gnome people, and then there's everyone else. Gnome pissed off a lot of it's (now partially ex-) users with the changes it went under, and a number of those users switched to KDE/Enlightenment/XFCE4.

      If there's a cult in the Linux DE community (there isn't), it isn't with KDE users, it's with Gnome users (or rather Gnome developers). Nobody else is at all zealous about their DE -- though of course we're happy it does the things we want it to do.

      Back on topic though; I love Firefox and use it on my Linux desktop, but I wouldn't use it for my iBook. It's just too slow there, and ugly. If you use OpenOffice in Linux, and have tried it in OSX, it's the same thing. Safari was built specifically for OSX, and built well.

      I'd love the same extensions that I have in Firefox, but I'm willing to trade that off for speed, prettiness, and good interoperability that comes with Safari. I do wish they'd sort out the download manager though, it freaking sucks.
    • pkulak, on 10/12/2007, -9/+3"Don't be silly, nobody who uses linux has sects"

      HAHA! Great. :D
    • gengisPhat, on 10/12/2007, -5/+9@rickcarson Ctrl-Tab or Ctrl-Shift-Tab to hard for you to use in Firefox to shift between tabs?
      (Sub Cmd for Ctrl on Mac I think)
    • mfratt, on 10/12/2007, -6/+6So what are us Fluxbox/Blackbox users?
    • bradbane, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3@rickcarson: in addition to ctrl+tab you can also use ctrl+pg up/down
    • panique, on 10/12/2007, -4/+3Don't forget the XFCE guys too. That one even puzzles me.
    • starmanjones, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5>so, here's the deal ;) Safari looks nice (cocoa interface),
      >but at the end of the day, people are just going to use
      >Firefox

      i always wonder who says things like this. everybody has firefox because of the extensions. they are awesome and powerful... and kick ass. but firefox on a mac just feels clunky. it feels like a windows application. its just irritating to use day in and day out. so really i dont know any mac users that have abandoned safari or the others that use webkit. shiira is a great browser. feels and acts like safari with features no other browser has. safari isn't threaten at all. i couldn't use firefox as my only browser.

      and in the same general thought... i got irritated at mail.app because it can be a CPU hog. so i decided i'd switch to thunderbird. i spent a month working with it trying to get it to feel comfortable. i use the interface extensions and got it looking like mail.app and finally i gave up. mail.app just works better. does what you want. feels like a mac app. so made myself an imap account sent all my mail to it... and brought back mail.app. i can't tell you what relief is was. its just works. and the latest incarnation doesn't seem to be as big a CPU hog.

      anywy.
    • rickcarson, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1@genghisPhat:

      I was rather hoping someone would prove me wrong. You Sir, are the man. :D

      @bradbane:

      You Sir, are also the man. Err... a man. Another man.

      Many thanks to the both of you. :D
    • plueken, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0I've temporarily switched over to Opera 9 from the Firefox 1.5 series, with plans to probably return when Firefox 2 comes out officially. This discussion brings up one new thing I like about Opera by default.

      Go to previous tab = 1
      Go to next tab = 2

      No ctrl-alt-whatever or cmd-option-whatever necessary. Just one single number.
  • littlebiker, on 10/12/2007, -5/+16Just in case if you didn't know a recent poll shows that Safari is still the number one choice for many, http://www.tezaa.com/view/Best_browser_for_Mac - Like IE as it's shipped with the OS, it gives safari a better chance.
    • nogami, on 10/12/2007, -17/+6Hardly a scientific poll (just some web-poll). All of the Mac users I know (including myself) installed Firefox instead.
    • jabbar, on 10/12/2007, -9/+9i hate firefox, so i use safari and opera for different things:

      Safari for RSS and youtube viewing
      Opera for everything else
    • defectDS, on 10/12/2007, -3/+11I never felt right with firefox.. or with any other borwser for that matter. I've tried, but I get homesick. It just feels very out-of-this-world. Plus Firefox and Camino don't have the RSS feature I like in Safari, where it shows a number of how my new unread feeds there are right next to the bookmark folder of my feeds in the bookmark bar. I couldn't live without it.
    • NikZ, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4@nogami: It may interest you to know that Safari has been consistently the majority choice by Mac users (by far) pretty much since it's introduction. Rob Griffin from MaxOSXHints runs a "browser wars" poll every year, and while they may be "just more web polls", you'll see that the relatively tech-savvy MaxOSXHints reader base do indeed favor Safari over all other browsers. The latest poll (browser wars 6) shows Safari more than doubles FireFox in popularity.

      Browser Wars 4:
      http://www.macosxhints.com/polls/index.php?qid=browser4&aid=-1
      Browser Wars 5:
      http://www.macosxhints.com/polls/index.php?qid=browser5&aid=-1
      Browser Wars 6:
      http://www.macosxhints.com/polls/index.php?qid=browser6&aid=-1
    • macluvjay, on 10/12/2007, -11/+5When you guys get ready to use a real browser, check out Opera. I used Camino for a long time on my G4 and G3 iBooks, but have all but completely switched to Opera. It comes with most of the add-ons mentioned on this site and then some. To all the firefox users: Look at Opera for the features you'll be getting in the next fiew versions of Firefox. To top it off, Opera is smaller and faster and more secure than any other browser. It took me a while to get used to. Maybe two full days of actual use, but I would never go back. I use it on my Macs, PCs, and Linux boxen alike.
    • motang, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6As long as it's standards compliant (which it is) then it's all cool. One of the main reason I don't like IE is because it's not standards compliant and it's not as much customizable as Firefox is, or even Safari from this article.
    • kolywater, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8firefox for mac is ghetto due to its interface (even if you update the widgets). camino is significantly better choice if you choose to not use safari.

      i like camino because pages often render better in camino, and back/forward is much faster on my powerbook. yes, opera is the fastest but its interface is AWFUL. even less osx-like than firefox. i really wish they would fix up the opera interface. while safari is correct according to standards, camino is a little better at handling website errors.

      oh and for RSS, safari is a DOG if you let it keep any history. i much prefer the excellent and free RSS reader Vienna.
      http://www.opencommunity.co.uk/vienna2.html
    • strcmp, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8I as well as many other technically inclined Mac users prefer Safari not because it is preinstalled but because it is the best browser on OS X.
    • ThankTheCheese, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3For sure. On Windows, Firefox is the absolute best, but in OS X, I can't use anything but safari for most things.

      One thing that does erk me about Safari is the way it handles Flash. If a flash movie is playing, and you focus on a different window to the one with the FLash, the movie frame rate reduces to about 2-3 fps. Not sure why.
    • jabbar, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1@kolywater

      opera has skins. i suggest looking into them
  • NoOneButMe, on 10/12/2007, -1/+15I find Firefox - Bon Echo 2 at least - to be surprisingly slow on my Computer. Better to use Camino then Firefox - runs loads better.
    • jer2eydevil88, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8Yeah even the G4 optimized builds don't stand up to Camino on my G4 Powerbook. Still on the new Intel Macs Firefox is loads faster.
  • Koopa, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13I just like that the Safari RSS reader shows me the number of new stories on each bookmark i have on my toolbar. If Firefox could do this, I'd switch in a second.
  • themurph2099, on 10/12/2007, -2/+14Camino runs much faster on my Mac mini.
    • Salvo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Camino runs much better than Safari on most machines, however Camino doesn't support RSS feeds natively yet. Ever since I updated to Tiger, I've been using Safari's RSS feeds.
      If I'm in a Hurry and Safari is Beachballing due to RSS feeds, I'll use Camino to visit a specific page, but I usually use Safari exclusively.
    • GregoryHarbin, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Camino is the fastest browser I've ever used, and since I never use RSS, it's perfect for me.
    • dille, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Camino is certainly looking good, but it's not quite there yet. As far as I know you can't even drag tabs around and having no session saving is big NO NO for me. Otherwise Camino looks good, works well and is fast.

      I just don't get it, session saving is one of the most requested feature for just about any browser out there and still only a few actually have it? It's one of the key features of Opera (at least for me). You can get session saving for Firefox via extensions, but unfortunately with Safari you need digg up cash (Saft).

      As far as I know Camino doesn't have anything else except a couple of amazingly slow session-scripts that do not even work correctly :(. Camino + Adblocking + Session saving would be Perfect. For now I go with the FireFox. Sure it's not the prettiest / fastest browser around for OSX but add couple must have extensions and it is one damn good browser, like Macs, It just works.

      Opera 9 OSX version is god awfully buggy so till the 9.1 bug-fix version comes out Opera is no go too...
    • valkraider, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Safari has "free" session saving using Safari Stand:
      http://hetima.com/safari/stand-e.html
  • cdcarter, on 10/12/2007, -18/+1Hmm, the article seems to be sladhdotted.
  • millixaw, on 10/12/2007, -6/+11"Firefox hasn't won the the browser war yet"

    Yeah, against Internet Explorer. There's not much of a challenge coming from Safari. Being exclusive to Mac OS isn't going to help against a "war" against a browser available on every platform.

    MSIE"s trump card is the user install base of Windows. If only 10% of computers ran Windows, then MSIE's usage wouldn't be much of an issue.
  • jmob, on 10/12/2007, -4/+9seems like a silly argument. Which ever browser gets shipped with a computer is the one the majority of people will use.
  • rialye, on 10/12/2007, -16/+1why are so people always so closed minded. firefox didnt invent tabs and it might be nice but opera started it all and opera run perfect on os x, its run perfect in windows, and perfect in linux. its perfect always all over. sure it doesnt support some things but nothing is entirely perfect
    • shai969, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Umm....I don't think you know what perfect means.
    • brentzilla, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"sure it doesnt support some things"

      That to me would mean it's not perfect...but maybe that's just me.
  • reVerse, on 10/12/2007, -17/+8The tagline says "Firefox hasn't won the browser war yet" - and this is misleading as it implies that Safari might. Lies. Safari works on OS X. OS X is, and probably always will be, a niche system. Until it gets up to 15% or higher usage, its not a contender. You can't win the browser war with a browser that only exists on a niche system, even if it had a moderate adaption rate on that niche.

    • Salvo, on 10/12/2007, -5/+7Quick, everyone!
      Change your User-Agent line to Safari, even if you're using Firefox or Opera in Windows. ;)
    • Angostura, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12Christ-on-a-pogo-stick. Wasn't it apparent to you that the article was talking about the battle for browser share on Mac OS X?

      Sheesh
    • strcmp, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Look around on the internet (google, webkit.opendarwin.org etc...) and you'll find that the WebCore rendering engine is slowly but surely being ported to Windows and Linux. Dave Hyatt (lead Safari dev) commented somewhere that he wanted to start releasing nightly builds of WebCore for Windows soon, so keep an eye out.
  • mcg321, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7"its perfect always all over."
    "but nothing is entirely perfect"

    Nice.

    Anyway, I use Camino on my Macbook - lightning fast.
    • starmanjones, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1>stly" sites... like my bank, credit card company, employer's
      >site, 401k, etc, actually WORK with Safari, I will have to
      >stay with Firefox. Firefox is a second thought for most
      >developers who give a crap beyond IE. Safari falls farther
      >down the list.


      i have none of those problems with safari. that is usually an activeX problem and considering most of the exploits exploit activeX it would scare me to use it. isn't not having activeX one of the advantages? is to me.
  • squidreturns, on 10/12/2007, -11/+6I call BullSquat on this. I'm a hardcore Mac dude... but I can't use Safari. Until "IE Mostly" sites... like my bank, credit card company, employer's site, 401k, etc, actually WORK with Safari, I will have to stay with Firefox. Firefox is a second thought for most developers who give a crap beyond IE. Safari falls farther down the list.

    I can't tell you how many sites just flat out dont work. Every time I have to submit a form in Safari my questions is "will I get what I expected from this interaction, or will I be dealt up an error code... or worse yet a blank or incomplete screen".

    I'd love to use the default, built in to OSX option. But it's a non-starter for me when I interact with "The Real World".
    • superkendall, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4What sites are you using? My bank was the last thing that didn't really work OK with Safari and they fixed that long ago. The eBay postal integration now works as it should, I haven't come across a site in a year or so I actually had to load Firefox to view instead of Safari.

      In the real world the need to accomodate Firefox has led I think to better standards, and thus better Safari, support.
    • NikZ, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I have to do online banking with about 4 different banks, over twice as many accounts. I use Safari 100% of the time for it all, and it hasn't failed me yet.

      But then, I could just be lucky.

      Oh, I also live in the real world, and I'm a 'hardcore mac-dude'.
    • rickcarson, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Safari bombs out (crashes, burns and dies) on one of the main real estate sites in Australia (something like... realestate.com.au), I think it has to do with an image map.

      Also, because Google has no love for Apple/Safari.... things like the Google Spreadsheets beta won't work on Safari. Google is pretty bad for supporting Macs.

      I've had the Javascript Console up today because I've been debugging some of my client side code this morning, and I notice that (according to Firefox) Google and Oracle's pages spit a metric crapload of Javascript errors. Mostly they seem to be about the stylesheets. It does make me wonder about Firefox's CSS support...
  • kdbarto, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I use BOTH firefox and safari, as some of the websites I visit don't work with one or the other, and at work I need both just to interact with the bug system web pages. Poorly written IE explicit POS that they are...
  • bmson, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11Safari has passed the ACID2 test and was the first browser to do so.
    http://webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html#top

    Safari is a level 3 browser with Firefox and Opera. IE7 is level 2 og -IE6 is level 1
  • Kickboy, on 10/12/2007, -2/+18As long as people are moving to a browser other than IE, I don't think it matters what they use!
    • brainache, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Huh, that holds, unless the browser they are switching to is in fact Internet Explorer with a different face. Cue CrazyBrowser et al.
  • altjeringa, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8Firefox is slow as Dirt. Safari leaks memory and has really crappy javascript support ( thought vastyly superior CSS support ). What we need is a RAIB ( Redundant Array of Independent Browsers ). One browser multiple rendering engines. Frankly I don't care what browser I use ( and I randomly move between 3 or 4 ) as long as it doesn't stink of Microsoft.
    • coolbru, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Have you tried reporting Safari bugs? http://webkit.opendarwin.org/ Whenever I've reported one, they've been all over it like a rash in no time. The nightly builds are really pretty good in general, lots of new toys like SVG and CSS3 stuff (rounded corners - yay!). They've recently added a Venkman-style JS debugger called Drosera.
      In general I find Safari far more pleasant to use than Firefox on OS X: it's way faster, and its rendering is generally better looking, but FF does have some fantastic developer tools that I use a lot too.
  • Overlord, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Not a bad article for a list of Safari addons that people can use.

    I don't see why so many people care that much about what browser is better. I think the important thing is people use what works the best for them. There are always some reasons not to use certain browsers for compatiblity reasons perhaps, but that war is close to being over.

    Personally on OS X I use Shiira -- http://hmdt-web.net/shiira/en -- it is completely free and adds pretty much all the features mentioned in this article plus it's faster than Safari. It does the job of browsing fine for me. I don't consider it "the best" browser, but there is no such thing as "the best" browser.
    • Angostura, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Inquisitor is really nifty. Personally I still use the free 1.0 version. Much more limited... but does the job.
    • d4rkn1ght, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I use all; they all have their weakness and strengths.

      Firefox is a little slower than the other browsers, but it still a hell of a lot better than IE.

      In the end I think all the other Mac browsers, Safari, Camino, iCab, etc, are great. I like more the fact that we now have more choices than we had in previous years. Remember the days of Netscape and IE only choices.

      The fact that I can browse modern sites in my oldest Mac, is something that we can do with the many great browsers we have today.

      http://upitfree.com/v2/show.php/1090_yahooicab.png.html
  • adodaro, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7For everyone who wants the firefox feel in OS X but need the support for plug-ins, why not try Flock? http://www.flock.com

    It's based on the Mozilla engine plus there is a way to convert all of your extensions from firefox over to Flock! Even though it's beta I'm using it right now and haven't touched firefox/safari in a few months. And it has native support for Web 2.0 stuff like blogging, flickr, RSS feeds and del.icio.us built right into the browser. Just a thought.
    • dmoney06, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3too slow for the time being. Great add ons though.
  • ridgelawrence, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2I got Firefox when i first got my mac, but realized it was taking up a lot of RAM so i started using Camino and it was GREAT but then it lost all my bookmarks and i re-did them thinking it was a one time error. Happened again and i switched to safari.
    • pero69, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2nice. I had that happen with camino too. thought it was a "one time" incident but for me it actually was. (so far.)
      anyway, i'll keep using it. it's amazingly fast and looks good doing it. (plus i remember way too many pages to need that many bookmarks anyway)
  • noliberalbull, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13I'm sorry, but I don't know how anybody can use firefox as their standard browser on OSX. It is no doubt the best brower in windows, but on OSX, it is not even close. I use safari for its RSS, but once camino incoporates a better reader, I may be switching. But I think anybody who uses Firefox on OSX is just still beholden to their previous windows years, cause if you have used a Safari or Camino for any amount of time, firefox use is literally painful on OSX. I'm really not trying to bash firefox, I've been using it on windows since it was called phoenix, but you couldn't pay me to make it my default in OSX. The few sites that dont support it (and I do mean few) are generally completely non-essesntial. I've been with 3 banks in the past 3 years, they all worked with it just fine.
    • Undefined, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6I agree. I love firefox and I use it as a secondary browser for testing my sites and projects that I'm working on. but on osx the firefox gui is just way to clunky and akward, and I don't think the speed advantages of firefox is true on osx, windows maybe, but not osx. But as a web developer, I gotta say that safari's css support is far superior to anything else out there. When working with css safari always does exactly what I want it to do. firefox is pretty good, but it still takes a little bit of tweaking to get it to look exactly how I want. Firefox's javascript support is really good though. And IE is the bain of my existence. I think the world (or at least the internet) would be a better place is IE did not exist. As long as thats the direction we are moving in, I think its a good thing.
    • prockcore, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4"But as a web developer, I gotta say that safari's css support is far superior to anything else out there."

      Please! Safari didn't even support border-collapse or overflow: auto until Tiger. list-style-position: inside doesn't work right either.

      Safari still has a bug where if you have a textarea with less than 5 rows, the scrollbar doesn't appear.

      Not to mention the utter lack of being able to style form elements in Safari.
  • glafira, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5I only use Safari because it binds into OS X so nicely, via not only the Interface but also functionality.
  • purpleaspi, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8For Safari extensions, I think this website is cool:
    http://www.pimpmysafari.com
    • speedyrev, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Did you read the article? It was referenced there.
    • purpleaspi, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1It was down... :)
  • skyman375, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2I like Safari, but the lack of ad blocking sends me to Camino. I don't understand though, why Camino seems to render pages more like Safari than Firefox? I have to use Firefox for some banking and other 'IE' optimized pages.
    • PathDaemon, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2Did you RTFA ;-) ?

      Saft adds ad blocking.
    • prockcore, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5Saft also costs $12. I'll stick with firefox (Flock actually) thank you. Spending money on extensions is insane.
    • r3dx0r, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1as for ad blocking, pith helmet is the best choice for safari. it uses regular expressions and offers saving unique ad blocking preferences for every site. and it's donation-ware. there's a link at pimpmysafari.com which was mentioned in the article
  • LinuxZealot, on 10/12/2007, -5/+3I use Safari on OS X, but Opera 9 looks nice too. FF on mac isn't like on windows, safari wins without trying....
  • Undefined, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Safari integrates really nicely with automator actions also. I have all kinda of automator actions setup using safari, and I can't really duplicate them for firefox.
  • JustAGamer, on 10/12/2007, -7/+1UMM YA... GO KDE!!! WOOT and umm go firefox as well and opera should BURN!! same with IE 7 but safari is well ya u burn too!
  • iNoles, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Firefox are working to Cocoa Widget some time in the future.. I'm not Firefox Developer. There are some progress over in Josh Aas's Blog.
    • Sp1k3d, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4That's true, Linux and Mac OS X will get native widgets in the default builds of Firefox 3.0, and in the Cairo branch of 2.0 builds.
  • mrfx2, on 10/12/2007, -6/+1WHAT your on crack someone get the shovel.
  • skoles, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Only thing that's keeping me from using Safari is the useless bookmark sidebar.

    I want it so I can have it constantly open on the side and browse at the same time like in Firefox. Right now Safari uses dropdown bookmarks and using the sidebar only causes you to lose it once you click a link.
  • Hydraulix, on 10/12/2007, -5/+1I'd use Safari if it didn't always use 50-70% of my CPU.
  • noseeme, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Safari's rendering engine, I can't remember what it's called, but it is based on KHTML (there are a lot of good changes, however), ***** up a lot of sites that are far from being standards compliant. Yes, it is bad to deviate far from W3C standards (I always try to make sites that follow the standards as much as I can), but not everybody is going to do that, whether you like it or not.

    Personally, I don't care much about the look and feel of applications. I don't have a problem with the GTK+-like stylings of Firefox, even though they are not as aesthetically pleasing as programs that use the Cocoa widget.

    Like most Linux users, I use Firefox for all of my browsing.
  • n3il89, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I have a Mac and the reasons I use Firefox is because:

    1. greasemonkey is a life saver and creammonkey (sp?) doesn't work for my scripts
    2. i love live bookmarks. i like viewing web pages but i only want to see what i want to see. if safari can give me live bookmarks functionality then that would be great
    3. more websites work with firefox. albeit there aren't many that don't work w/ safari but hey it is insurance

    fix those for me and i'm a safari guy
  • Universal, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I will always think of Camino as a secondary [backup] browser. But Firefox still rules them all.
  • jfinke, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1I am still using OSX 10.3.9. Due to that, I can't run safari 2.0. I don't know if that is what the article was referring to or not.

    So, I am still running Safari 1.3.2.

    I stopped using it as my primary browswer and switched to Firefox 1.5 instead. The way I got around some of the interface issues was to install Tab X extension and the GrApple (Brushed) theme. That makes it very similar to safari as far as the look goes.

    Plus, I get access to all of the other great FF extensions. Plus, using FoxMarks, I can sync my bookmarks between my mac, my pc, and my linux servers.
  • gpd209, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Anybody know why Safari 1.3.2 (OS 10.3.9) crashes on Google Videos? I use Safari primarily, but for this and a handful of other reasons (extensions, IE "only" websites) I use Firefox about 20% of the time. I LOVE the improvements Shiira makes on Safari, but it is too unstable on my computer.
  • tannoy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Incremental search! Afaik, mozilla variants are the only browsers with this wonderful enhancement. Why it still hasn't caught on and replaced standard windowed substring searches everywhere i'll never know.

    For some really interesting features, check out Omniweb. It's been the coolest browser since it's inception on the NeXT platform.

    http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/gallery/
  • gordonjl, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I would prefer to use Safari over Firefox but Safari doesn't play well with gmail's shortcut key combos. The only other issue with Safari is that I can't fill out a form's drop-downs etc by just using the keyboard.
  • bpapa, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I've been in Mac land for a little bit and here's my experiences -

    Safari was what I started wiith, but after a bit I started to miss the Firefox features. :( So I switched.

    I used Firefox on Mac for a little bit. But I missed the RSS stuff. And, with all my extensions, it ran like crap. Then I realized more and more that I didn't really need most of these extensions any more. They were duplicated with Dashboard widgets.

    So then I started with Camino, and I haven't looked back. I still use Firefox, but only for development purposes (web developer toolbar, javascript debugging). The RSS stuff from Safari has been replaced by another reader (Feed). I also use Safari sometimes if something doesn't seem to work in Camino. But Camino is my first choice.
    • generic109, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3bpapa,
      Yes, I use the three browsers the same way. Firefox has replaced IE as the browser to which to go if all else fails. Camino has the best interface, but doesn't work with many websites: Gmail, for instance. I generally use the browsers in that order: Camino, Safari, Firefox.
    • generic109, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I think that Firefox for the Mac is a great thing: if it weren't for Firefox, the discontinuation of IE might actually mean something. I hope one day that OpenOffice serves the same function for Mac users, and the threat of pulling Office becomes meaningless.
    • valkraider, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2What are you talking about Camino doesn't work with GMail? I use it all day every day with three GMail accounts. Works just fine.... In fact, I use it mainly for GMail because Safari doesn't work as well with GMail.
  • imyayo, on 10/12/2007, -3/+0The things I don't like about Safari are the aqua buttons. I also prefer the way firefox handles RSS feeds in the bookmarks toolbar.
  • feldzmo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0Firefox has one feature absent from Safari: Its bookmarks bar has a "slide-over" feature, similar to the main Mac Menu Bar: if you click on one menu item and the drop-down menu appears and you change your mind and slide the mouse over to another menu item, the first zips back up, and the new menu item now effects a new drop-down menu. This doesn't happen with a "Toolbar," I have been told, but only with a Menu Bar. So Safari should emulate Firefox in this respect. In fact, that's why I preferentially use Firefox . . .
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