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Firefox - The best on Windows and Linux, not very X-ish yet. 1.5 will improve that, using more native widgets instead of their own custom, cross-platform ones. Firefox 1.5 should seem almost as much like a native app as Camino. The support for extensions makes it super-powerful, but can sometimes add bugs if you install a flakey extension. I've even had an extension with bugs that affect the extension manager, making it impossible to remove without digging in the profile folder.

Safari - Somewhat flakey ever since 2.0. They did fix the major memory leaks and backport the fixes to Panther Safari, so now it's gone from "never use it" to "why bother using it". The RSS support is nice, but I haven't found any RSS useful outside of Podcasting.

Shiira - Just like Safari, only with a better interface, more features, and iffy translation from Japanese.

Omniweb - Like Shiira with even more features, no translation need for English speakers, and a price tag. Killer tabbed browsing, though.

Camino - Firefox with a X native, Cocoa interface. The lack of extensions without deep hacking limits the possibilities. Some people have written extensions for it, but it's a lot harder than in Firefox.

IE - An outdated relic. It has no features that aren't in Firefox with extensions. Modern browsers have much better standards support. IE actually had the best standards support at the time, but that's not hard when your only competition is IE 4.

Opera - It seems like the makers of Opera keep adding things so people think they get their money's worth. It's so crammed with features it's getting an actual learning curve. It's very nice, but most people will only use a tiny bit of what it offers. It also, like Firefox, uses custom widgets.

knob, the update from a few days ago seems really buggy.  I don't what the developers are thinking.

skymt wrote:

The RSS support is nice, but I haven't found any RSS useful outside of Podcasting.

Then you just haven't been looking hard enough. RSS feeds have become the primary way I browse. In the below animation I just put together, you can see the feeds I subscribe to as well as a glimpse into the amazing interface of RSS Menu which I mentioned in my previous post.



Newspapery
-Comics- Custom feed of all my favorite comics; the "open all unread" feature of RSS Menu comes in really handy here.
-Current Events- Feed of my custom Google News page, which uses over 4,500 sources (keeps me from getting the same biases over and over again) and then (as I set it) outputs 2 top stories, one world news, two US news, and three Houston news items.

Forums
-MacAddict- 15 (in total) of the most recently in my favorite forums on the MAF.
-NSGN- Latest posts on a Christian forum I go to.
-GFX Artist- Latest post on an art forum I go to.

Tech News and Knowledge
-Mac Minute- Latest Mac news, the pulse of the Mac community.
-General Tech- Feed of the Sci/Tech section of Google News, which I use to find out what's going on in the general (ie. non-Mac specific) tech community.
-Mac OS X Hints- Mac OS X tips every weekday.

Occasional
-Feeds for sites that are either rarely updated or not looked through by me on a daily basis: Homestar Runner (weekly), As the Apple Turns, a friend of mine's blog, and Dev Articles.

With the feeds above I am effectively tracking thousands of sites, and the sites I track are either chosen by me or (as is the case with Google News) the nature of the content (ie. the categories) is chosen by me. Whenever a feed I'm subscribed to has been updated, RSS Menu notifies me via Growl, I look in the feed(s) for articles whose titles catch my interest, and when I click on an article in the menu it takes me straight to the web page for that article. Each feed is checked on a per-feed schedule, and RSS Menu supports authenticated and unauthenticated RSS and Atom feeds.

RSS is not new; thousands upon thousands of sites out there have feeds of their content (including most blogs, Apple [even custom iTMS feed], MacUpdate, VersionTracker, Mac Fix It, and a whole lot more)

Last edited by Macskeeball (2005-09-06 11:44 pm)

AAPL Shareholder wrote:

maxintosh wrote:

Or OmniWeb...

but omniweb is, more or less, safari.

Uh, no.

Not at all.

MuckSavage wrote:

AAPL Shareholder wrote:

maxintosh wrote:

Or OmniWeb...

but omniweb is, more or less, safari.

Uh, no.

Not at all.

He means it uses the same rendering engine. That's why he said "more or less".

The original post was about the unreliability of browsers. The rendering engine is a major part of that, especially with WebKit which handles stuff like history, cache, page loading, etc. So in the context of the topic at hard, Omniweb is basically, more or less, Safari.

I'm on Camino nightlies, see my sig for add-ons and using them is absolutely not difficult at all. The September nightlies have the about:config reactivated so you can change the settings like you can in Firefox if you wish.

Firefox is a good browser but it's a horrible Mac app. It doesn't use keychain, arrow key navigation on text boxes don't conform to Mac behavior, can't change keyboard shortcuts from Keyboard prefs, etc. It's a bunch of little things.

Gipetto wrote:

I've seen some intermittent issues with video in Safari. No biggie, it's typically with WMP so I just write it off as MS being sucky again. What does bug me about safari is memory usage. I can sometimes leave a browser window open for a few days, just keep making and deleting tabs. When I go to then close that window it can take up to 30 seconds to close... basically, the longer the window has been open (ie: the more pages it has seen) the longer it takes to close.

I do that too.

I been having media issues with Safari  & Shiira as well. My thought is Apple messed something up in WebKit the last time they updated it.

BearsFan34 wrote:

I'm not interested in RSS feeds at all, so Safari works for me...and Camino is 2nd place on my Mac. Firefox=not Mac friendly...for me...yet.

The RSS Menu program I've posted about in this thread is separate from the browser. It just uses the default browser and Camino happens to be my default. Also, Safari under Tiger has RSS support. I use 10.3.9 though.

I actually earn my living with a web browser--downloading and uploading order reports, managing inventory at third-party sites, managing online credit card transactions, etc--and I won't use anything except OmniWeb. OW used to be notable for its beautiful rendering, which was a hair slower than the rest, but its robust feature set is second to none, and is nowadays the main reason to use it. Occasionally, when there's a site conflict, I've switched to Safari or IE or Camino or FireFox or Opera. And while most of what those other browsers do overlaps with much of what OW does, it's all the little stuff that keeps me coming back to OW. Cookie management, site preferences, browser spoofing, thumbnail tabbed browsing, robust ad/image/popup blocking, I can't live without any of 'em anymore. So no, not all browsers are hopeless. Plus, their support is excellent--my support requests have always met with useful answers within 24 hours of asking.

J

user wrote:

I use Safari for just about all of my browsing except for a subscription website that uses javascript to allow me to make notes on futures charts. For that I use Firefox because the site only supports IE and Netscape.

Firefox's Mozilla roots seem to fulfill the Netscape requirement.

If you activate the Debug menu in Safari, you can spoof other browsers.