Sorry, Scott. I still choose Safari over Firefox for the bulk of my browsing
You can't read any tech news these days without being
bombarded with the fact that Firefox is taking the browser world by storm. Goodie for Firefox. It's a perfectly fine browser and if I had to work on the Windows platform all day long, it would be my sole browser, for sure. It kicks IE's insecure, buggy ass. But on the Mac -
Safari still rules my browser kingdom.
Here's why:
I'm a speed freak. For me (as always, your mileage may vary), Safari is still significantly faster.
And when you are accustomed to command-clicking 20+ tabs open in a matter of seconds, speed is important. Everyone I
know talks about how fast Firefox is. Faster than IE and Netscape 7 and Mozilla, sure, but it's not as fast as Safari -
not on my machines at least.
No close widget on each tab. I often want to close tabs that aren't active. If the tab is active, I
can command+w to close it, but if the tab isn't active, I have to make it active before I can close it. I
hate that.
Without using an extension, the tab bar cannot be always in place. That's minor, but jarring when you are used to having it always there, as I am with Safari. In Firefix, the tab bar goes away when there is only one tab open. So I downloaded the extension. But I shouldn't have to. It should be a preference. CORRECTION: As many of you have pointed out in your comments, there is a preference in the current version of Firefox to keep the tab bar in place when only one tab is open. I don't believe that was an option in pre 1.0 versions of Firefox and I admittedly didn't notice it there in 1.0 until I just checked. Or maybe I'd missed it all along? Regardless, I stand corrected.
Thanks for pointing it out!
It doesn't look like a Mac app. I don't want to download a bunch of themes to make Firefox look like it belong on my Mac. And frankly, I think most of those themes suck.
It doesn't behave like a Mac app. This really annoys me... when I am in a single-line form field, the address bar or the search box, I am accustomed to being able to use my up and down arrow buttons to jump to the beginning or end of a text entry. Firefox ignores the up and down keys in those places. It wastes my time. Similarly,
command+up has no effect when I want to jump to the top of of page from the bottom (or middle for that matter).
I will give Firefox credit where credit is due. There are some very cool extensions you can install that enable you to do some pretty amazing things with Firefox. And when I want or need to do those things, I switch to Firefox for that session. Firefox also works on a handful of sites that Safari breaks with (the WIN intranet publishing backend, for example, that I am composing this very post in)
Bottom line: For Mac OS X, I think Firefox still has a long was to go before it beats Safari. It will be a contender one day, I'm quite sure of that, but it's not there yet. Until it matures, Safari will remain my primary browser of choice.