For an alternative OS to be a viable desktop contender, it must have a good web browser. Mac OS X’s biggest stumbling block at its introduction was its limited selection of (slow) web browsers. Things have changed. Now there are more than 9 to choose from. Ars Technica has a head-to-head comparison. Gecko-based browsers stand out in speed and functionality, but look like ports, while Safari earns the top spot for just being well put together. In a similar vein Mac P2P outlines the various P2P options for Mac users.
I use Camino most of the time on OSX. It’s not as “featureful” as some of the other gecko-based browsers, but, you know what? I don’t care. I use Ephiphany under Gnome too — sometimes, simpler is better.
Safari, also, is nice. It renders things well, and to me, seems a tad bit quicker on my machines (both G3’s) than Camino. I just hate the blasted brushed-metal interface. It’s okay on iTunes; I can start my music and minimize it. On Quicktime, well, it’s less annoying than WMP, or the default mplayer GUI. But I don’t like it on the browser. I have the same complaint about iCal.
article, with some conclusions i wasn’t expecting. I’m not a MAC user, but definitely an interesting read.
It crashes on me constantly. Most often on sites with forums or other “functional” content. I’ve reported every crash, every site, to Apple. Seems to make no difference. I can’t use Safari on any forums at all, so it’s pretty damn crippled for me. Otherwise, yes, Safari is fast. But fast and broken aren’t exactly a winning combination.
I use and recommend Camino. It seems faster to me than Safari. IE is by far the worse. OmniWeb has picked up in speed a lot.
You were expecting IE to win right??? Sucker.
I honestly hate Safari’s UI in general, things are just badly placed, not to mention I’ve come to a few sites that it just doesn’t like to render well with.
I can’t speak for dual G4800s, but on my iBook 700 Safari is _much_ faster to use than Camino. It’s a shame, too, as I prefer Camino’s UI, and miss Mozilla’s rendering engine.
When I have nothing else running mon my laptop I often start out with Camino. As soon as I get doing other things, the system really slows down. It’s about then that I switch over to Safari, as it stays responsive.
Page load time is less of an issue to me than responsiveness. Maybe if I had a faster mac and/or dial up I’d worry more about page load time, but in the mean time, I’m using Safari about 95% of the time.
I use safari for most of my every day browsing. It crashes about as frequently as Camino (which is not that often – once every 2 or 3 weeks maybe). I like the bookmarks layout and make good use of the bookmarks bar folders. I do not know which forum Jace had problems with (care to list a few?). I have used Safari on close to 2 dozen forum sites without a hitch. I am not sure what elements CPUGuy doesn’t like in Safari. There are hardly any elements *to* place.
The sites that do have problems occasionally are sites like ESPN.com with lots of dynamic (and Flash) content. The only problem there typically is that the site loads and works fine but there is no scroll bar. The other problem I have with Safari is that it doesn’t handle huge pages well. Imagine a page with 5,000 or 10,000 lines of text each with a form element and link on them. The scrolling speed on pages like that is just terrible. That’s where Camino comes in – and for LSAC.org. For some reason Safari can’t even load the darn page.
… and which fit your particular needs,
so long as it respect Web Standards, so the web can be the same for everybody.
The situation seems to be pretty sane for mac users :
no ugly Netscape 4 anymore,
* two dead proprietary browsers (Netscape and IE mac),
* 3 OS browsers based on the excellent standard compliant gecko engine,
* 2 other browsers based on the OS khtml engine made by KDE,
and now good thanks to the work of Apple (David Hyatt especially)
* and iCab, which seems to be a legacy browser, and should
be avoided.
If only the situation could be as good for Windows users !
I use Mozilla and Safari about equally. The biggest complaints about Mozilla have always been its size and startup time. The size problem can be reduced with careful selection of installation options (as in no email, chat etc). Have not tried Firebird yet. Anyone know if Firebird fixes the slow startup time.
I have no trouble with Safari quitting and crashing, no problems with forums. I know there are issues for some with that though and they are addressed here:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107657
Also, there are many freeware utilities for getting rid of the brushed metal look and replace it with aqua.
Mozilla Fireird is faster and does a nicer job rendering pages, but I am going to pick Safari because it has a brushed metal interface… huh?
Hi
95% of all the Webdesigner doesnt care how it lookes with the Gecko || KHTML engine, they only care if it lookes good in InternetExplorer. Dont get me wrong, its damn annoying that you cant display the webpage correctly because they designed it after IE bugs.
I really hope Mozilla / Firebird reaches to a bigger market soon, so webdesigners start to go back to how things should really look and work like.
/Konrad
…if only this had been a comparison of Linux browsers, I bet you hell would have following loose.
…if only this had been a comparison of Linux browsers, I bet you hell would have broken loose.
Now that MS has dropped development for IE for Mac, I fear that — no matter how good other OS X browsers are — Mac users will run into sites that are effectively IE-only and be out of luck. Now, we can use IE 5.2 to bail us out, but what about a year or two from now? IE for Windows will continue to be, for all intents and purposes, the “standard” for web designers and pages. For those of you who know more about this than I, help me out here and, hopefully, reassure me — will Safari, Mozilla etc. programmers be able to match Win IE “standards” and therefore keep all sites accessible to Mac users, or is MS in a position to prevent that?
I never use IE, so what are these IE only sites people keep talking about? I haven’t seen one in years.
Also does anyone have any current statistics on web browser usage? According to the webalizer logs on a couple of my websites, IE only accounts for about 60-70% of the traffic. 30-40% of the entire web browsing population is a *big* number.
A couple of examples…
We pay our bills online with a credit union. When you do it in IE, everything works fine. In Safari, the dates get whacked out, ie that you want to pay your power bill on “Sept. 1, 2050” rather than “Sept. 1, 2003.” Sometimes Safari even tries to pay your bills twice. Needless to say, this is a huge concern.
Yesterday, I tried in Safari to download an mpeg movie from a service bureau’s ftp site — no go, even after entering the password etc. In IE, the movie loaded and played in QT just like it’s supposed to.
I know Safari will get better, but will it always be one step behind Win IE? This is the sort of stuff that worries me as a Mac user.
Here’s the reassurance:
Going forward, it will be very difficult for web designers to continue to develop “IE-only” sites.
The announcement from Microsoft that they will no longer be developing a standalone browser has changed the landscape a bit. I doesn’t seem to be any different at first, until you realize that everyone who currently runs Win95, Win98, WinME, WinNT, Win2k, and WinXP will be unable to take part in any new features introduced in IE7.
In order to use IE7, people will have to buy a new operating system and in some cases, a new machine. Now, I know a lot of people who a pretty content with Win9x and see no reason to change. That adds up to a lot of machines running IE6 and below.
So, as a web developer, what are you going to do? Code a page using IE7 -specific features, and lock out the majority of your customers using IE6 and below? Not likely.
In my view, what will end up happening is that those people running non-IE7-capable machines will go download a next generation browser that WILL run on their machine. Like Mozilla and company. And _that_ would be a good thing for the Net as a whole.
As for what Mac users will do without IE, last I knew IE didn’t disappear off my hard drive when they announced that they wouldn’t be continuing development. Just keep using it for the odd site that requires it.
Weston — I feel better after seeing your post. Here’s hoping that you’re right!
Fun With Safari:
Go to
http://developer.Apple.COM/membership/usa.html
Click on the link to “ADC Hardware Purchase Program Store” near the top.
Notice how the resulting page is completely mangled – half of the silver bar at the top is missing, most of the images on the page are missing, etc. (Alas, Camino 0.7.0 Nightly 2003-07-15 also mangles the same page in the same way.)
Mozilla 1.4, Mozilla Firebird 0.6.1, Netscape 7.1 and IE 5.2.x all render the page properly.
I’ve found far too many pages (especially ones with JavaScript) that Safari doesn’t handle properly to consider using it as my main browser. Camino is just so much faster and crisper than Safari, or any of the others. If only there were more than 2 people working on it … 🙁
Sarfari is rock solid for me and I love the look of it AND the tabs are great. I get the impression they have taken the best aspect of of Mozilla and Firebird (tabs and search box) and added the wee close tab thing to each tab. Nice. What I don’t like is one thing……to switch between tab needs a silly key combination…Apple + Shift + Arrow. Mozilla and Firebird do this better I think! Simply Ctrl + TAB.
Running Safari 1.0 (v85) and no glitches on that page at all.
What are you talking about?
Would be nice if they implemented a full functioning pdf renderer.
especially one you can fill in pdf forms with.
As PDF being the native fileformat for OSX I don’t understand this. Can anyone point this out?
(sorry for my bad English)
Have a nice day,
non native speaking Zef
Actually, MS IE on Mac is continuing…in the form of MSN for Mac (IE6 is supposed to come w/ MSN). Don’t know who would get that, but it’ll be there.
I’m surprised noone has mentioned mail to for Safari. I have a javascirpt that does it for me but it really should be part of the browser. BTW Safari hardly ever crashes on me and certainly not on forums.
Yeah, I’m not sure what they’re talking about either. I visited the page in Safari; looked ok to me.
As far as an full functioning PDF renderer goes:
If you’re referring to a standalone app, there’s always Adobe Reader. Yeah, it’s slow; however, Panther should include a version of Preview that blows it away.
If you’re referring to an in-browser PDF plug-in, check out the “PDF Browser Plugin” at http://www.schubert-it.com/pluginpdf/ It doesn’t support forms at the moment, but since it appears to be embedding the Preview PDF renderer, hopefully it may get enhanced features when Apple updates Preview in Panther.
After a short rounnd robin im session with webdesigner friends of mine i found out that most of them prefer to design for mozilla and ie, ie and opera usually need some hacks to display css layers as they should.
so, the assesment that most of them use ie is abit wrong, oh and for the record, most of them work in the US and some freelance and one at abel&baker.
the majority of them would rather design for mozilla and safari (the dont know what either gecko or khtml/webcore is) so when you ask around the next time, ask about the branded products using the technologies not the engine name for the renderers…
Click on the link to “ADC Hardware Purchase Program Store” near the top.
Renders perfectly for me!
is it just me? I honestly think safari is the nicest browser [UI wise] out there ….?
🙁
I had been a full-time safari user and by and large I had not problems with stability. The tab system is great, though I never thought the Bookmark system was as good as Apple seemed to think.
The one major problem I’ve had is that when printing from Safari it doesn’t seem ot allow headers and footers giving informaiton on URL, page title etc. As someone that does a lot of academic research (i.e. articles off Proquest) this information is very important. For this reason whenever I was doing research browsing I was having to use IE. Most of the time I print to pdf rather than waste paper, but it is important when referencing on-line sources to include the URL and the date it was accessed – this was too much hassle on Safari.
Omniweb however has changed that. While it isn’t as fast as Safari, I agree with the Ars article that the Aqua look and adherence to Apples interface design guidelines makes it a great browser to work with. Best of all, it provides appropriate headers and footers when printing and seems to have a few less problems with some interactive sites. Safari used ot occasionally lose track of marked articles on Proquest and University Library catalogues. I haven’t had this problem with Omniweb so far (touch wood). In addition I much prefer the bookmark system used by Omniweb to Safari’s. It seems to me easier and more intuitive.
The lack of tabs is good, but hopefully that will come soon. However if it wasn’t for the lack of header/footer info when printing I think I would have stuck with Safari.
“is it just me? I honestly think safari is the nicest browser [UI wise] out there ….?
Nope. I thought Safari’s interface wasn’t that great at first. After I used it a couple of days, I realized that it’s by far the best out there. It’s so compact, simple, and functional that I wish other browsers would copy it more.
Also, Safari almost never crashes on me. Maybe once every 3-4 months, and I use it for around an hour a day at least. Camino, on the other hand, crashes every couple of days, and its bookmark management is terrible imo.
By the way, am I the only one that thinks Galeon blows Epiphany away for Gnome? Epiphany’s icons seem so far spaced apart that they waste tons of space.
When I look at the improvement from the last version of Konq. I used(maybe two years ago) to the first version of Safari(last year) to the current version of Safari the improvement is dramatic.
I find that for the most part Safari renders pages better (i.e. they seem to look right) than Firebird on my PC.
The only page I’ve ever had trouble with is ESPN. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to find sports news on the web.
I feel pretty confident that with Apple and the KHTML guys working together, OS X and KDE are gonna have a pretty awesome browser in the near future.
I downloaded Camino pretty soon after buying my Powerbook. Much cleaner and more responsive than IE and a damn sight faster when loading pages. But hey, we could work that out for ourselves 😉 I’ve not had any real compatibility problems except for one site with a poorly written style sheet that renders links on a background of the same colour (but white links on colour in IE)