What makes a good web browser?

macintosh_nextmacintosh_next
Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
I have heard many "switchers" (such as myself, although I haven't complained about this) complain that Mac doesn't have a good web browser, and that Safari is the best one available (although isn't that great, either).



So, um, what makes a good one? I thought Firefox 2.0 for Mac rocked -- am I wrong, or...what? Just wondering if anyone knows what these people are talking about, could be I am just not picky enough.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 4
    smashbrosfansmashbrosfan Posts: 139member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Macintosh_Next View Post


    I have heard many "switchers" (such as myself, although I haven't complained about this) complain that Mac doesn't have a good web browser, and that Safari is the best one available (although isn't that great, either).



    So, um, what makes a good one? I thought Firefox 2.0 for Mac rocked -- am I wrong, or...what? Just wondering if anyone knows what these people are talking about, could be I am just not picky enough.



    Hello again.



    This is a sketchy topic at best. I don't think there will ever be a complete fix for this, but the main reason people complain Safari is a bad browser is because it doesn't work with certain secure websites.



    This however, isn't Safari's fault. Out of all the major web browsers out there like Firefox, Opera, Omniweb, IE... Safari actually is the best at adhering to the codebase standards that have been set to the World Wide Web. Internet Explorer however, does not do such a good job of keeping these standards. And since Windows and thus IE dominate the computer world, web designers write their code to work with IE. In some cases, even so far as to violate set rules and standards. This renders Safari and Firefox useless on those sites.



    Safari uses one of the best rendering engines out there. It's fast, takes up little resources, and is well intergrated with OS X. But when no one follows the rules, it breaks the game, so to speak.



    Firefox tries to bridge that gap by following IE rules to an extent, but it's, to put it bluntly, a resource hog. It's also not very well designed to work with OS X extentions and such.



    So to answer your question, Safari isn't the problem. Internet Explorer is.
  • Reply 2 of 4
    macintosh_nextmacintosh_next Posts: 224member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by smashbrosfan View Post


    Hello again.



    This is a sketchy topic at best. I don't think there will ever be a complete fix for this, but the main reason people complain Safari is a bad browser is because it doesn't work with certain secure websites.



    This however, isn't Safari's fault. Out of all the major web browsers out there like Firefox, Opera, Omniweb, IE... Safari actually is the best at adhering to the codebase standards that have been set to the World Wide Web. Internet Explorer however, does not do such a good job of keeping these standards. And since Windows and thus IE dominate the computer world, web designers write their code to work with IE. In some cases, even so far as to violate set rules and standards. This renders Safari and Firefox useless on those sites.



    Safari uses one of the best rendering engines out there. It's fast, takes up little resources, and is well intergrated with OS X. But when no one follows the rules, it breaks the game, so to speak.



    Firefox tries to bridge that gap by following IE rules to an extent, but it's, to put it bluntly, a resource hog. It's also not very well designed to work with OS X extentions and such.



    So to answer your question, Safari isn't the problem. Internet Explorer is.



    I see. Hmmm, interesting note. :-D Yet another reason to hate Windows.
  • Reply 3 of 4
    skatmanskatman Posts: 609member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Macintosh_Next View Post


    I have heard many "switchers" (such as myself, although I haven't complained about this) complain that Mac doesn't have a good web browser, and that Safari is the best one available (although isn't that great, either).



    So, um, what makes a good one? I thought Firefox 2.0 for Mac rocked -- am I wrong, or...what? Just wondering if anyone knows what these people are talking about, could be I am just not picky enough.



    hehe.. that is a good question.

    I regularly use 3 browsers (on Windows XP machine) - IE, Firefox, Opera and also use Safari when on a Mac.

    Each one has advantages, but none are perfect because there is no generally accepted language for web pages!



    IE is, by far, the best in terms of compatibility. However, I still stuff cropping up through it (various pop ups, scrips etc... if I surf questionable websites ). It's also the most responsive. However, IE is NOT GOOD at scaling pages if you change font sizes from defaults. And the IE7 is no better than IE6. Also, some of the layout stuff in it is hard to get used to.



    I'd put Safari and Firefox in one basket. They're more secure, and are a bit better layed out than IE, but they're slower (both on PC and Mac), hog more resources, and don't render some pages correctly... and can't do some of the MS based multimedia in the webpages.



    Opera is a weird one. It's very fast, very well layed out and designed (you can see that somebody really thought about how to design a web browser), scales pages with custom zoom and font sizes beautifully, but is not compatible with a lot of pages, doesn't have a lot of plugins that are needed for multimedia, and is not capable to using a lot of hardware acceleration which results in a some lag when scrolling through graphics-rich pages.



    That is my experience anyways.
  • Reply 4 of 4
    turnwriteturnwrite Posts: 372member
    In a word: Firefox.

    http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/



    However, if you want something slightly more streamlined and Mac-like, there is Camino:

    http://www.caminobrowser.org/
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