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Safari vs. Firefox

speg

Diamond Member
Although I use Firefox on Windows 99% of the time, I had never bothered switching away from Safari on the Mac. So a couple weeks ago after I ran into a Safari unfriendly site I switched to Firefox.

Today I returned Safari back to it's proper spot on the dock. Firefox seemed slow, buggy, and just wasn't cutting it. Anyone else have problems with it on Mac? Have a preference?
 
It's definitely slow on the Mac. I generally use Camino, which uses the gecko rendering engine but has a native interface.
 
I liked running FF on my computer at work because I could easily transfer my profile from home (bookmarks, extensions, etc).
 
I love how safari scrolls smooth like butter which is way more pleasant than firefox when using two finger scrolling on the trackpad. However, other than that, Safari is a usability nightmare.

The shortcut keys are dumb: why the f*ck would I want to contort my hand to hit command-r to refresh when F5 is a virtual standard? Why is there no / search? command-f is so incredibly clunky. It's also ugly but I'm sure they could dump the brushed metal skin with the flick of a switch if they wanted. I just cannot understand some of the decisions they've made when designing it 😕

That and the lack of extensions. Most of the time I could live without most of my extensions but I'd really miss them and some (like Adblock) are just indispensable.

Firefox is still a little messy. Like flash stuff shows blank unless I do things like scroll it almost to the top of the screen or sometimes just pass the mouse over it. Java applets always disable trackpad scrolling for some reason. Plus it's annoying how the use of mac widgets/menus means you can't place bookmarks by hovering over folders and such.

All in all, it's firefox hands down 🙂
 
It really depends on the specs of the system. It is a fact that Firefox is far more bloated and slow than Internet Explorer. However, people like to use Firefox over IE because of the tabs, extensions, and increased security. On my main rig, I cannot tell a difference between using Firefox and IE, as it is pretty much instant in everything. However, on my 1.7Ghz Celeron machine with 256MB of memory, Firefox is far slower than IE.

If Safari is secure (I wouldn't know, as I have only used Safari for very brief periods of time on Macs that I do not own) and does all that you need it to do, I see no reason to switch to Firefox. I would use IE over Firefox if it simply supported tabbed browsing and was secure.
 
I love Safari, but unfortunately there are some plugins I use at work (WMLbrowser and UserAgentSwitcher) that only work in Firefox. If Camino could use Firefox extensions (which they say they will NEVER do) then I would use it. So Camiino really offers nothing over Safari except the Gecko rendering engine. Camino offers nothing over Firefox except a prettier interface. What I would love is for somone to come out with a way to "compile" or translate the Firefox plugins for use in Camino...
 
Originally posted by: kamper
The shortcut keys are dumb: why the f*ck would I want to contort my hand to hit command-r to refresh when F5 is a virtual standard? Why is there no / search? command-f is so incredibly clunky.

Command is the new control. / doesn't seem to bring up a search Window in IE, I'm not sure about Opera.

Using the command key is pretty simple once you get used to it. 🙂
 
Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Originally posted by: kamper
The shortcut keys are dumb: why the f*ck would I want to contort my hand to hit command-r to refresh when F5 is a virtual standard? Why is there no / search? command-f is so incredibly clunky.

Command is the new control.
Sure, and I can appreciate that. It's nice to be able to copy and past properly into a terminal. It's just simply way less convenient to hit command-r than F5.
/ doesn't seem to bring up a search Window in IE, I'm not sure about Opera.
Not sure about opera either. Konqueror does it. IE isn't exactly a good model to compare to. As far as I'm concerned there's no excuse for not implementing it, unless there's something even better. A pop-up box is not it.
 
on the mac firefox is not really that great. i'm using shiira right now which is pretty nice. it has a few quirks so i keep safari on the dock but either is a better choice than firefox.
 
Originally posted by: Baked
Safari for Mac, FF for PC. That's my preferences when I use both system.
Same here, although I actually prefer Mozilla 1.7. I no longer have the Mozilla suite on my system(s) though.
 
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