“Web browsers abound for Mac OS X, but their differences have become harder to discern. Before Safari appeared on the scene in January 2003, several browsers contended with the slow-rendering Microsoft Internet Explorer,” Glenn Fleishman writes for The Seattle Times. “In November 2002, I rounded up several browsers that had their strong points as alternatives to IE; a couple of months later, Apple’s introduction of its free Safari browser pounded the nails into IE’s coffin, and, I would have guessed, pushed competing browsers into the dustbin of history.”
Fleishman writes, “But there’s a lot of room in the browser space because Safari remains idiosyncratic: It’s Apple’s specific idea of what needs to be in a browser and how a browser should work. Apple didn’t throw in the kitchen sink, and occasionally one feels the need to wash up dishes. Four other browsers are worth contemplating, especially as three make their way from beta to release in the next few weeks to months: Camino 0.8b, Mozilla 1.7RC2 (release candidate), OmniWeb 5 (beta 6.1) and Opera 7.5 (release version).”
Fleishman writes, “Mac OS X browsers have matured to the point that you might have no reason to switch from Safari. But if you’re looking for a specific reason to change, you can’t go wrong with any of these four.”
Full article here.
Has anyone tried these before? I have used OmniWeb 5 but found it ‘clunkier’ than Safari.
I know some of the other browsers have good benefits and features too but, damn, I just LOVE Safari!!!
kitchen sink er.. besides problems reading SOME sites.. what is safari lacking..
For me, Safari has some quirks that really bug me and it is not the fastest horse in the race. Just go to buy.com and watch Safari load & reload the java graphics.. forever. Camino works perfectly and is faster. Do I miss the flashback feature? Yup. But I like Camino’s speed better.
Panther 10.3.4 Java 1.4.2 iMac 1.25GHz 17″
Shiira is my current browser of choice, its from a Japanese developer and is based on Apple’s Web Core foundation. It’s really fast, I love Safari but in terms of speed Shiira has the edge. If you have an older Mac this is a good choice, it doesn’t use much resources and did mention its fast ?
http://hmdt-web.net/shiira/index-e.html
Firefox is my pick for sites that don’t play nice with Safari, plus it’s quite fast.
Opera rules for power users. The only one I haven’t used is OmniWeb.
I concur about FireFox, and I’m amazed it wasn’t reviewed in this article. It’s multi-platform, open-source, light-weight, fully standards-compliant, seems to render everything out there with no difficulty, and it’s exceedingly well-designed. It’s been my default browser for a long time.
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/
Safari is great – but, here is a weird problem I have with it:
I have a wireless network at home, and instead of using a Airport card for my iBook, I’m trying a D-Link USB Wireless adapter. (Which does say is compatible with Mac OSX) When I am wireless, Safari freezes up after a few websites, but IE and Mozilla don’t. I know if I had a Airport card, this probably wouldn’t happen, but it does seem like another incompatibility issue with Safari.
” Shiira is my current browser of choice, its from a Japanese developer and is based on Apple’s Web Core foundation. It’s really fast, I love Safari but in terms of speed Shiira has the edge. If you have an older Mac this is a good choice, it doesn’t use much resources and did mention “
Just downloaded it.
WOW, FAST
Firefox gets my nod over safari…..one handed tabbing, and it shows web addresses of any link that the cursor is placed over. It also handles my yahoo email notably faster.
I have noted a (very) few website incompatiblities.
I just wish I could put in into apllications (with my other browsers), rather than have it co-equal with the hard drive in the Finder.
PS I had a M$ owning friend download Firefox…he loves it too.
MF
MF
There is one browser for the Mac that I’ve seen recently on a mac at a local business that had thumbnailed page images in a drawer to the left side of the main screen, but for the life of me I can’t remember which browser it was – someone told me it was based on Safari, but going to each of these browser’s websites didn’t get me a screenshot of what it was I had seen – anyone have any ideas?
“I just wish I could put in into apllications (with my other browsers), rather than have it co-equal with the hard drive in the Finder.”
Huh? Firefox is in my Applications folder and works just fine. Firefox is pretty good, and for that matter, so is Mozilla. And I liek the ability to implement toolkits inside both of them, like the Bloglines tool, but I do not like the tab implementation in either Firefox or Mozilla. I still use Camino on occasion; it seems to work better with some sloppy Javascript. I am a paid Omniweb and Opera user. Omniweb is pretty, and its workspace feature is great. Opera still seems slow to me, and it has some weird keystroke combinations. Once in a while, I’ll fire up IE just to check a site. Just downloaded Shira, and I am impressed. The reality is that Safari itself is what provided the competitive spur to all this new product development. Many people worried that Safari would smother competition the opposite has proved true.
BuriedCaesar, that’s Omniweb.
Firefox is the best unless they fixed Safari. Some pages in Safari are so slow. Unless that has been fixed but I haven’t heard.
BuriedCaesar,
I think you were looking at OmniWeb 5, which has it’s tabs in a drawr on the left or right side of the browser. I like it a lot and can’t wiat for it to come out of beta. (i.e. not terribly stable yet). It’s on beta 6 and should be done in the not-too distant future.
Firefox plays nice on the web and is as fast as anything out there for OSX. I have all the above mentioned browsers in play and I continue to return to Firefox.
Purely informationally speaking, on my wintel boxes Firefox loads pages twice as fast as IE. IE has a nicer way to work with favorites (bookmarks), but Firefox is now my default.
safari is the best browser i used but i am using 10.2.8 so i cant have up to date version. current safari that i am using opens most web pages tho there are few that arent compatibl.
The one thing I don’t like about firefox is that it uses its own proxy settings rather than the systems proxy setting… Its a real pain between work and home as I have to manually turn on the proxy at work in addition to switching the location in the apple menu.
I do not like Safari’s lack of better cookie controls and a couple of other things. It is still my default browser, but I am keeping a very close eye on alternatives and will have no problem changing my default.
I find OmniWeb’s display of tabs at the left to be slower than I would like. There are still issues importing bookmarks correctly and flexibly from Safari and others. (Importing Camino bookmarks listed them as Safari Bookmarks. Synching bookmarks to .Mac does not seem to be working yet either, but will be a great feature.) When OmniWeb fixes these, and other issues, it is on its way to being a great browser. I also like and use Camino. I have yet to use suggestion above and will try to do so shortly.
Fascinating how IE has been correctly been relegated to non-existence for Mac users who know better. Some users still don’t know about alternatives (including about Safari) and do continue to use IE. Sad.
…I should add regarding the slowness of OmniWeb’s tabs that I open a lot of tabs at once, often from about 20 to 50+. I sometimes have trouble with other browsers opening larger numbers of multiple tabs, too.
Interestingly, I found the very large Netscape much improved after they last upgraded it. Now that it has been working better, didn’t I hear that AOL is discontinuing it?
I stopped using Safari because it randomly crashes on submitting forms and data loss is something I will never forgive. I like Camino best because it has larger buttons with icons that are clear and intutitive. Also its download manager lets you open files from its interface which is very clear how to do it, which helps make up for OS X having no refresh option for the desktop (the one thing I miss from Windows) and it supports services, so you can have it speak text aloud and over 99% of websites display fine in it – the only ones that don’t are the ones that hard code in Netscape or Explorer – it shows up as “Netscape 5” although it really uses the same rendering as Netscape 7.2 will.
RE MacFreak
Maybe I misunderstood, but you can enable viewing link previews by checking “Status Bar” under View in Safari. That will give you a small bottom pane with URL’s as you mouse over links.
I like all the mac browsers, but I use Safari the most. I think Opera is really nice and might start using it more.
The only problems i see with camino and mozilla are the rates at which they write updates.. I occasionally use these two, and it seems that whenever i do, i get the ‘new version available’ message… I gave up on updating them a while ago..:-