Apple Safari vs. Mozilla Firefox

Thursday, February 19, 2004

~~A few~~ Several small tweaks, and I’ll dump Safari for Firefox.

Firefox does JavaScript better, but Safari’s UI has the superior polish that GUI-heads like me expect. Firefox is getting there.

mannu — Feb 19, 2004 8:55:15 AM — # ↩

From what I know, even IE for Mac was better than Safari (and IE for Windows itself). Apple did to Microsoft what Microsoft did to Netscape. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Dump Safari. Firefox rulez!!!
- Kiran Jonnalagadda — Feb 19, 2004 12:48:06 PM — # ↩
  
  Re:
  IE for Mac is a piece of shit -- but far better than IE for Windows.
  
  Safari is by far the best browser on any platform I've used.
teemus — Feb 19, 2004 12:34:22 PM — # ↩

Camino?
Where does Camino figure?
- Kiran Jonnalagadda — Feb 19, 2004 12:56:38 PM — # ↩
  
  Re: Camino?
  Camino's lead developer is now Safari's lead developer. He decided that the Gecko API was ridiculously complicated, and that it would be much easier to build on KHTML than to work with Gecko. Camino was formerly called Chimera (trademark problems again).
  
  Further reading:
  http://daringfireball.net/2003/01/safari
  http://whatdoiknow.org/archives/000684.shtml
  http://news.com.com/2100-1023-980492.html
  
  I can't find Dave Hyatt's original posting where posted code snippets showing how much easier KHTML was to work with.
  - jesserud — Feb 22, 2004 9:35:44 AM — # ↩
    
    Re: Camino?
    Are you sure it was Dave Hyatt's decision to use KHTML rather than Gecko? I thought Apple had already made that decision before hiring Hyatt.
    
    It was David Baron who posted code snippets: http://dbaron.org/log/2003-01.shtml#l20030109. The lxr links are probably out of date since they include line numbers.
    - Kiran Jonnalagadda — Feb 22, 2004 3:50:43 PM — # ↩
      
      Re: Camino?
      I remember Hyatt gushing about how much cooler KHTML was, and extrapolated from that. I guess Apple decided that speed was the greatest priority, and Hyatt made the KHTML decision. But that is just a guess.
kingsly — Feb 20, 2004 8:44:22 AM — # ↩

Can you mail me the .icns file for firefox ?

Thnx!
- Kiran Jonnalagadda — Feb 20, 2004 11:50:53 AM — # ↩
  
  Re:
  Done. How's your iBook doing?
mindlace — Feb 20, 2004 10:42:14 AM — # ↩

What small tweaks?
For me, firefox's failings are a worse helper-application experience - not only does it not launch the correct apps like Safari, it's also completely unclear to me how to change them... I usually get a drop-down menu with only one option. It also inherits mozilla's mac behaviour of popping up an un-dismissable context menu when I spend too long with the mouse down in option menus. Also, for me the three finger function-ctrl-up/down to switch tabs is way less cool than the platform-standard command-option-right/left. Firefox also crashes routinely, something I can forgive it. It's also noticeably slower than safari, but beachballs less frequently, so that's kind of a tradeoff. It doesn't have Venkman, which, imnsho, is the Killer App for the moz platform - though it looks like I can get that as an extension. I'm looking forward to trying more of Omniweb 5, as it seems to be doing a lot of innovation in the UI space.

All that being said, firefox/mozilla is still a stronger standards-compliant browsing agent; I use it when safari fails me, and it continues to be my fat-client target of choice.

What would Firefox have to do to be your preferred browser?
- Kiran Jonnalagadda — Feb 20, 2004 11:41:54 AM — # ↩
  
  Re: What small tweaks?
  Your list, plus:
  
  1. Picking up system wide network preferences (particularly proxy server)
  2. CSS text-shadow support
  3. A close button on each tab
  4. Better behaved dialog boxes
  5. Death to that little window that pops up when Exposé is activated
  6. Scrolling the appropriate distance when using the arrow keys
  7. Form widgets that aren't ugly as hell
  
  OmniWeb holds promise. I'll see if it's worth the expense when they go stable. Omni generally makes software worth paying for.