Back in the mid to late ’90s when graphical Web browsers appeared, the offerings were quite limited. You had a choice of using the revolutionary Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer, Microsoft’s early attempt at extending its iron grip on PC desktops into the online world. A handful of alternates appeared in the years that followed - and some even worked on the Mac, or claimed that future versions would: Opera and the seemingly forever-in-beta iCab come to mind.
Fast-forward a dozen years, and Netscape’s heritage lives on in open-source projects, Internet Explorer is Windows-only once again, and more than 100 Mac-compatible Web browsers have hit the scene - including Apple’s own Safari, which, in a curious twist, now runs on Windows PCs too. (Sounds like a throwdown to Microsoft to start WBWII. But with so many options on the Mac these days, IE would be walking into an ambush.) Here’s a look at some of the coolest Mac browsers out there.
Finally, a Decent Browser for Windows and Mac: Safari 3 Beta
First it was iTunes for Windows. Then it was Windows running on the Mac. Now Apple has sent its Web browser, Safari, over to the dark side. Safari 3 beta (free) is available for the Mac and for Windows PCs.
The browser itself is a righteous piece of work - and we mean that in the best way. Sure, some of the new features sound like catch-up to Firefox’s hot mustard, but one look at the inline page search will bring back at least a few Firefox expats. If you’ve cursed the meager highlighting by Firefox (and other browsers, including the previous Safari), get a load of Safari 3’s reverse-highlighting. Finally.
Other slick new features: You can resize a text field just by dragging it. You can move tabs into new windows (with some genie-effect eye candy). You get a supersized Reset Safari dialog that’s now full of options. If you enable the Debug menu (quit Safari, open /Applications/Utilities/Terminal, type defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1, press Return, and then launch Safari again), the Web Inspector (Debug > Show Web Inspector) is hella cool, showing the page’s HTML source in a block view, where you can collapse specific tags to get a better look at the structure. And Apple’s website promises more goodness to come in the full release of Safari 3, due out in October with the release of Mac OS 10.5 (aka Leopard). If you’re tracking such things, the Safari 3 beta was downloaded over 1 million times in the first two days - and a security patch for the Windows version followed soon after.
Safari 3 lets you see what you'll be getting when you hover over a link.
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Crazy Like a Fox on Fire: Firefox
Up from of the ashes of Netscape’s Navigator browser, the Mozilla Foundation and its Firefox browser (free) escaped certain homogenization in Netscape’s sale to AOL and emerged as a solid No. 2 contender to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in the rekindled browser wars. (Backstory: Microsoft previously announced its intentions to abandon the standalone Internet Explorer at version 6.x, originally released in 2002, keeping IE7 intertwined with and exclusive to the Vista OS. Well, the company has since rejiggered that plan, now offering IE7 as a standalone product for folks using other versions of Windows. Combined, the two versions of IE own 57.3 percent of the overall browser market, compared to Firefox’s 33.7 percent and Safari’s 1.5 percent. Keep an eye on how Safari for PC fares in the fray by checking Browser Statistics at W3Schools.)
Even on the Mac side, Firefox has a loyal following of folks who either hate Safari, have a soft spot for Mozilla’s formidable Gecko engine and its Netscape-ian roots, or simply find Firefox the most nimble and multiplatform-savvy browser available. In these days of biplatform users, suddenly Apple releasing Safari on Windows seems even smarter than it did a mere two paragraphs ago. Dang.
Firefox deserves props for its extensible architecture, which enables developers and users to customize it eight ways from bath day without mucking up the app’s core functionality or geeking out with raw source code and compilers (unless they want to). If you want a browser that lets you add no end of site-specific widgets and other conveniences to it, give Firefox a try and load up on accessories at addons.mozilla.org.
Like this friendly chicken, Firefox will do just about anything you want it to do.
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It Ain't Over Till We See the Price Tag: Opera
For everyday use, we gave up on Opera’s browser years ago during the first browser wars, when Opera for the Mac was looking like never-to-materialize vaporware, and the company was charging money for its product. These days, Opera Software has shifted gears, now selling a mobile version of Opera for smartphones and apparently giving away the desktop version, although there’s a $29 Premium Support plan if you want help getting your bookmarks imported.
Opera (free with ads, $29 for Premium Support) has some cool, unexpected features too (and some that are just unexpected and oddball). The Zoom tool lets you instantly scale a site up to 1,000 percent of its native size, which comes in handy for Web developers, vision-impaired surfers, and, perhaps, obsessive eBay shoppers, but not many normal folk. Meanwhile, the Speed Dial pane shows thumbnails of your nine favorite sites, so you can jump to one simply by clicking the bookmark link - er, Speed Dial button. Ridiculousness aside, Opera has some good features for Web designers and aspiring developers, such as multiple view styles (View > Styles) which you can use to view and debug pages with specific elements disabled - CSS Positioning, HTML tables, or properly alt-tagged images, for example.
Opera's Speed Dial feature strikes us as silly, but the zoom and other custom view options are handy, especially for aspiring Web heads.
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For Social Butterflies: Flock
If you frequent social-networking sites, including Photobucket and Flickr, then Flock (free) was made for you. It’s got a Photo toolbar for browsing photos - your own, or others folks’ shared photos and photocasts. Better yet, if you actively contribute to such sites, Flock’s other integrated photo bar is a lower shelf for stashing items and Web Snippets (pretyped comments with basic formatting), and there’s a batch uploader for stoking your photo-sharing service.
And Flock is no one-trick goose. Photo-sharing tools notwithstanding, Flock is built upon the extensible Firefox, and plenty of handy Flock Extensions are available for free at www.flock.com, including a WordPress Sidebar for permanent access to your blog; another sidebar for del.icio.us bookmarks; toolbars for Digg and Facebook; lots of code-inspecting Web-developer tools; and Flock’d, which handily converts any Firefox extension to work with Flock.
Flock's photo bar can show a whole photostream; the undershelf stores pics and Web Snippets.
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Netscape of the Sea: SeaMonkey
Our favorite microscopic pets of the 1970s were actually brine shrimp, not real monkeys. SeaMonkey (free) is essentially the Netscape Communicator suite of Web browser, email client, WYSIWYG HTML editor, IRC client, and newsgroup reader, all polished up for round two. But wait, you say, Mozilla makes the Firefox browser! Indeed, it’s a long story, but the bottom line is that the Mozilla Project switched gears to focus on its standalone browser and email client (Firefox and Thunderbird, respectively), but rather than leave SeaMonkey to sleep with the fishes, Mozilla lets the project live on the company infrastructure while the open-source community keeps the suite current and frequently updated. If you long for the all-in-one convenience of a full Internet suite, give SeaMonkey a try.
The underbar app icons (Navigator, Mail & Newsgroups, Composer, Address Book, and IRC Chat) go all the way back to SeaMonkey’s Netscape roots.
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Take a Walk, Buddy: Camino
Claiming to fuse the power of Mozilla’s Gecko Web engine with the style of Mac OS X, Camino (free) has been around for a while, always with some stalwart users, but it’s never quite been a major player. We give Camino props because it’s a Cocoa app, so it can tap into Mac OS X services like inline spell-checking. It’s also fast, and its Annoyance Blocking does a decent job of blocking pop-up windows and ads, though some of the junk still seeps through.
The Camino browser is cool, but not quite as cool as its automotive name-cousin, the El Camino.
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Mad Science: OmniWeb
Receiving mad props from respected Internet geeks and bloggers, OmniWeb ($14.95) had better have some kind of secret weapon feature to charge 15 bucks for what others are giving away for free. And a secret weapon it has: Searchable History. And we’re not talking about searching the titles of pages you’ve loaded, we’re talking full-page text search, so you can still track down that chupacabra page that you browsed a few hours, days, or even weeks ago and forgot to bookmark.
Exercise your inner science geek with OmniWeb’s Searchable History.
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Training Wheels for the Web: BumperCar 2
Sure, you can lock down Safari via the Parental Controls section of your child’s user account preferences (System Preferences >
Accounts), but BumperCar 2 ($29.95) is way more fun. It’s also got miles more security options including hour-specific and daily time limiters, white-list and blacklist filtering, and individual settings for chat-room content and the levels of profanity, violence, and nudity that Junior is allowed to see. BumperCar rides atop Apple’s WebKit framework, so it’s fairly similar to Safari, but the best thing about BumperCar is that it not only keeps kids out of trouble, but also helps them find cool, kid-safe sites.
BumperCar’s Tunnel of Mystery is the only such-named place on the Web that’s suitable for kids.
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Calling Captain Google: Googalyzer
You don’t have to be a Google fanboy to appreciate Googalyzer (free), but it helps. What else could explain our joy over a simple browser built on Safari’s WebKit with toolbar buttons for Google services (Maps, Groups, images, video, blogs, and so on), and an integrated notebook at the bottom for penning our blog posts, research notes, conspiracy theories, and whatnot without leaving the scene of the inspiration for a cold, sterile text editor. Well, maybe you do need to worship all things Google, but Googalyzer is exactly what some people need in a browser, and nothing more.
Integrated Google services and a handy notebook make Googalyzer a librarian’s best friend.
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iThink iCan: iCab
iCab (free, $29 for Pro version) is another throwback to the days before the first Web bubble burst - only iCab’s developers didn’t ride the wave to a fat retirement in Fiji, so iCab is still around in its original form. And it’s finally out of beta. iCab has unique features, such as a kiosk mode so you can let folks browse the Web on your Mac without letting them browse your porn and other personal stuff; smart cookie and Web ad management; and of course, the bane of many an amateur Web developer, the integrated HTML validator, which shows a report card on the current webpage, calling out every minute HTML error, as well as serious ones.
Red frowny man next to the URL bar means that the page breaks rank with the official spec—but come on, <font> and <center> are our secret weapons!
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For the Indecisive: SplitBrowser
Hey, it’s a big, busy Web out there, with more sites to surf than you’ve got time to kill - so do your boss proud and multitask by surfing four sites simultaneously when you should be working on that report. SplitBrowser (donationware) lets you do just that, and packs all four pages into one window. It’s just the thing to fill a brand-new 30-inch Cinema Display.
When you get around to writing that report, don’t forget to mention that you’ve quadrupled your productivity.
