Quote:
Originally Posted by
YakkoW 
Safari vs. Firefox... I'm still torn, honestly.
I like how Safari handles things like PDFs. I prefer Safari's design/layout, and until this new FF release, Safari's had a big advantage for users of shared computers due to private browsing (believe it or not, it actually does have uses besides porn!).
But Firefox still has two killer features....
When you enter a password on a website, Firefox lets you wait until you see whether the password worked before deciding whether to save it. Safari makes you decide before the submission goes through.
Also, Firefox's use of plugins allows for way more customization.
This is not meant as a slam, btw, I'd really appreciate a thoughtful response or two and maybe learn something, since lots of users seem to like Safari well-enough.
I really wish I could find more to like about Safari, because fast it is, and Apple's tying parts of its ecosystem to Safari. From what I can see, also, it doesn't have as much memory hogging creep as Firefox, which I have to shut down every few hours after it starts to rise above 400 MB of active memory use (and over 1.5 GB virtual).
But here we are at V4 in 2009 and Safari
still doesn't do even multiple home pages, let alone this next function that's critical to my way of working:
I use a browser as a multi-tasking workspace over time, dealing with news, multiple email accounts, shared docs, entertainment sites, research on various topics, social networking - and when you set FF to reopen the browser session you left,
you not only get all the tabs you were on - which, yes, I've learned you can manually ask Safari to do once it's up - but you get them with
each tab's complete history so you can go back and forth on each.
And when it comes to
add-ons, Mozilla's totally free version of the "App Store," Safari's so far in the rear-view mirror as to be invisible in FF's dust. Googlepedia - which presents a Wikipedia article (often quite relevant) to the right of the search results where the annoying spam, err, "helpful Google ads" usually appear is a prime example. Customize Google. Cool Previews, Cool Iris, etc.
The paltry few Safari add-ons I found for S3 (and I can't even find them or how to add them in Safari 4, but they must be there??) were all geek-tinkering stuff of no interest to me.
Note:
I just used the Safari help system to re-look and "add plug-ins," "extensions" and "add-ons" (with or without the word "Safari" ALL return ZERO help results, and the help available for "plug-ins" has no mention whatsoever of customizing Safari. WT.....??? How extensible is Safari meant to be?
(e.g., I thought X-Marks, which is now synchronizing my FF bookmarks across three computers) for example was now available??)
Then there's
the absence of multiple search engines in the search box. I frequently use a dictionary search, IMDB, YouTube, Wikipedia, and yes, of late, Bing is more and more often my choice. Why the limitation? $$ from Google to Apple? Not that Google isn't the leading engine by a wide margin yet, but again, it's not the only useful search tool in the box for all users all the time.
Safari preferences are also frustrating - mostly in their absence of fine-grain control. Very dumbed-down and limited by comparison to FF.
Unless I'm missing it, you can't even see your site passwords - a feature that sends me back to my FF prefs on my notebook whenever I need to open a site on another computer - or say, when I want to keep trying to warm up to using Safari.
And the lack of a progress bar indicator when loading a page, even if it wasn't totally accurate, is I think a step back in S4.
That said, top sites is a nice feature - typically Apple - rather useful eye candy, but someone tell me, what else am I missing?
Plus, purely subjectively, I find Safari kinda ugly.
So for me, I'm hoping for improved mem management for FF as I don't see Safari being in any rush to deal with any of the issues I've raised above.
So I am going to keep using Chrome. Firefox is good and very robust but I feel like it slows down my old computers.
I thought the Mozilla guys would drop the 3.5 all-together and go for 4 
)
