[SassyPants]

Any opinions on which is the best one?

[TETENAL]

Definitely Firefox is the worst since it isn't a real Mac application. It uses some HTML-like definitions for its user interface (called XUL) that have Aqua wallpaper pasted on, but they are not native controls and behave oddly on Mac. One should stay away from it like the plage.

Camino and Safari are both native Mac applications. They use different rendering engines (Camino the same as Firefox). Which one one likes better is just a matter of taste.

[SassyPants]

what exactly is the difference between the Camino and Safari redering engines? Any real practical application to the difference?

[Millennium]

Firefox is the best, by far. The controls are actually suited to the Web, unlike Camino's and Safari's misguided devotion to Aqua's widgets, which only look good in a narrow set of designs and do not respond to styling, so they cannot be changed. This renders them unsuitable for the Web, a fact Firefox avoids by using widgets that respond to the needs of Web authorss, not zealots.

If that weren't reason enough to switch, you can't beat Firefox when it comes to extensibility. A host of extremely useful extensions are already available for it -my favorites are Adblock and Forecastfox- and many more are in development.

This is not to say that Firefox isn't without its flaws. It could stand to make better use of certain Mac technologies, such as Quartz and Rendezvous/Bonjour and the Keychain. However, on balance it is a much better Web browser -if not necessarily a better Mac program- than anything else out there.

[Millennium]

Originally Posted by SassyPants

what exactly is the difference between the Camino and Safari redering engines? Any real practical application to the difference?

The rendering engines actually share quite a bit of code, as both are based on Open-Source projects. Camino uses Gecko, the rendering engine behind Firefox and Mozilla, while Safari uses KHTML, the rendering engine behind Konqueror (KHTML is made available to the OS through a wrapper called WebCore). Their standards support is roughly equivalent, with a slight edge going to Gecko for the moment though each one renders certain standards which the other does not.

As far as rendering engines go, it's mostly a matter of personal taste. Dave Hyatt, the person currently responsible for most WebCore development at Apple, also wrote large parts of Gecko's earliest code (including much of its CSS support), and there has been quite a bit of crossover between the two code-wise.

[TETENAL]

Originally Posted by Millennium

The [Firefox] controls are actually suited to the Web, unlike Camino's and Safari's misguided devotion to Aqua's widgets

I was not talking about web form controls within a web page. I was talking abou the browser user interface itself. And Firefox uses web controls for its user interface as well. That means everything from toolbar buttons to the preferences dialog is sort of a web-page with an Aqua wallpaper pasted on. That's not how a proper Mac application is built. There is absolutely no reason why a web page should change or "style" the user interface of the browser itself. For the user interface a proper Mac application uses native controls provided by the operating system.

Now for web form controls within the web page itself you have a good point and one can argue very well for a more web suited type of controls. I don't disagree here. But that's an entirely different matter.

[bmedina]

Originally Posted by TETENAL

There is absolutely no reason why a web page should change or "style" the user interface of the browser itself.

Of course there is: cross-platform compatibility. Without XUL, there would have been no Mozilla.

Otherwise, what Millenium said. The adblock extension alone is enough to use Firefox.

[Starry Night]

Originally Posted by SassyPants

Any opinions on which is the best one?

I've used all 3 quite a bit and prefer FireFox. I like Safari's "check spelling as you type" which I've never been able to get to work on the other two. But on the whole, Safari unexpectedly quits too often for my tastes.

Then I went to Camino. Not as pretty looking as Safari but very functional and fast. FireFox is like a more evolved Camino and I like it quite a bit. I've not tried the non free browsers like Opera, but for the free ones, FireFox is the best I've tried..........

[JazzCatDRP]

I used Firefox exclusively on Windows, but I don't like it on the Mac at all. I was going between OmniWeb and Camino until the latest Safari update. Now I'm back to Safari exclusively.

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

For Mac I would definitely say Safari 1.3 or 2.0.

2.0 is so much faster than anything I have used it is crazy.

Many just say Firefox because it is fashionable to do so. It was faster before safari 1.3 but not anymore.

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by Millennium

This renders them unsuitable for the Web, a fact Firefox avoids by using widgets that respond to the needs of Web authorss, not zealots.

Oh, the irony...

To the OP: Here's your answer. Safari has some nice features that Camino and Firefox don't have.

Camino has some nice features that Safari and Firefox don't have.

Firefox has some nice features that Camino and Safari don't have.

Shiira has some nice features that the other browsers don't have, and each of the other browsers has some nice features that Shiira doesn't have.

Here's the thing: all the browsers for Mac OS X except OmniWeb and Opera are free. You can download them all, try them out, and decide for yourself which you like the best. No two people on MacNN agree on what's the best browser, it seems, because individual tastes are different, and different browsers cater to different tastes.

Me personally? I'm currently using Safari as my primary browser, although Shiira is also in my Dock.

[Starry Night]

Originally Posted by Severed Hand of Skywalker

For Mac I would definitely say Safari 1.3 or 2.0.

2.0 is so much faster than anything I have used it is crazy.

Many just say Firefox because it is fashionable to do so. It was faster before safari 1.3 but not anymore.

I'm just giving my honest opinion based upon my experience, I had no idea that it was fashionable to like FireFox, in vogue without even trying

[driven]

I'm not a big fan of FireFox on the Mac. That said: I use it for GMAIL as it allows me to use the Rich Text Editing controls. The downside is that it also seems to be screwed up with the two finger scrolling.

For nearly all other pages I use Safari. As an added bonus I get the bookmark syncing with .Mac, which is knida nice.

[wataru]

Firefox is the only browser (besides Mozilla, I guess) that has extensions (and no, hacks like PithHelmet for Safari don't count). That's what makes it the best browser. All these people bitching about "boo hoo it's not true Aqua" are nitpickers that wouldn't know functionality if it bit them in the ass.

If you want a powerful web browser, use Firefox. If you want a pretty web browser, use Safari or Camino. Also note that there are many themes and widget sets out there that can make Firefox more attractive if it really bugs you that much. (Additional Firefox resources)

Incidentally, this is the billionth thread on this topic. Do a search to several very lengthy discussions we've had about this previously.

[MacDog]

One thing to consider:

Mozilla is dead. NO FURTHER DEVELOPMENT WILL BE MADE ON IT! I say this because it's important. Camino is based on Mozilla, Mozilla IS Mozilla. The Mozilla foundation announced a few weeks ago that they have ceased development on anything that isn't directly related to Firefox!

Go with Firefox, Safari or OmniWeb – because they're the only three browsers available that have any future at all on the Mac.

[bmedina]

Originally Posted by MacDog

One thing to consider:
Mozilla is dead. NO FURTHER DEVELOPMENT WILL BE MADE ON IT! I say this because it's important. Camino is based on Mozilla, Mozilla IS Mozilla. The Mozilla foundation announced a few weeks ago that they have ceased development on anything that isn't directly related to Firefox!

Um, I think both the Camino and Thunderbird developers would beg to differ. Go read the announcement again.

Many just say Firefox because it is fashionable to do so.

Yay! I'm "fashionable."

[selowitch]

While I do wish that Firefox had more Mac-native code and widgets, the reason why it's my primary browser is simply the great dropdown selector for search engines. Period. That saves me so much time and I haven't found another browser that implements this huge timesaver as beautifully.

What worries me is that Camino may one day go bye-bye and leave Mac users only with Firefox. I definitely appreciate Camino's greater speed and that fact that it's a Cocoa application. Put the search engine drop-down in Camino and I'd used that instead.

EDIT: I just discovered you can, in fact, add search engine plugins to Camino via a third-party preference pane called ExtraPref.

[Miniryu]

Originally Posted by CharlesS

Shiira has some nice features that the other browsers don't have, and each of the other browsers has some nice features that Shiira doesn't have.
.

does Safari have any features that Shiira doesn't?

[TETENAL]

Originally Posted by wataru

All these people bitching about "boo hoo it's not true Aqua" are nitpickers that wouldn't know functionality if it bit them in the ass.

I know functionality, that's exactly the reason why I prefer a browser that supports features like the Services menu and the system native spell checking. Since Firefox doesn't use native controls it behaves wrong on Mac in so many ways it's unbearable. Firefox doesn't even haven throbbing default push buttons.

[Abit667]

No real need to use anything else now, since they finally got safari out of the dark ages and it performs like a webbrowser should on a modern computer. Other then that I used to use FireFox, Camino is horribly slow.

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by Miniryu

does Safari have any features that Shiira doesn't?

Right now, it has SnapBack, although I'm sure that'll probably get implemented in Shiira eventually.

[bmedina]

Since Firefox doesn't use native controls it behaves wrong on Mac in so many ways it's unbearable.

The Mozilla Foundation has admitted as much. Yet despite that, many, many people continue to use it. Weird, eh?

[cpac]

This type of thread pops up all the time, and the answer ALWAYS boils down to personal preference.

If you're looking to pick a browser, download each of these (and possibly other choices), and give them a trial run for, say, a week. Stick with whatever you like best.

My 2 cents go for OmniWeb, as I'm a more features-obsessed person than the crazy speed-freaks that seem to go with other options. But of the options you've put here I personally keep both Safari and Camino (and IE) handy for rare occasions when OW doesn't work for some reason.

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by bmedina

The Mozilla Foundation has admitted as much. Yet despite that, many, many people continue to use it. Weird, eh?

Indeed:

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/macuser/news/...of-popups.html

The developer hired to work on the Mac version of Firefox has confessed that at the moment there are better browsers for OS X.

'If it was the only browser available for Mac OS X it would get the job done nicely,' said Josh Aas, in interview with Germany's macnews.de, Josh Aas says.'If you want features that only Firefox has, then it does a great job (RSS integration, extensions). If you have standard browsing needs and you want an everyday browser, then there are better options out there at the moment. Firefox has a way to go in terms of looking and feeling like a native Mac application (though it is coming along nicely). It can also be a bit slow, particularly while launching, and has some bugs that are the result of major architectural problems with the Mozilla toolkit on Mac OS X.'

Nonetheless he adds that, 'All of this stuff is fixable, and Firefox is going to rock soon.'

Even the developer admits that if you don't use the Firefox extensions, then there are better choices out there. A far cry from the "Firefox is the best, and if you don't think so, then you are obviously an idiot who doesn't know functionality from his ass" attitude that the Firefox zealots seem to like to hawk around here.

Of course, he says he is going to make it better, and if he does, then more power to him.

[Millennium]

Originally Posted by MacDog

One thing to consider:

Mozilla is dead. NO FURTHER DEVELOPMENT WILL BE MADE ON IT! I say this because it's important. Camino is based on Mozilla, Mozilla IS Mozilla. The Mozilla foundation announced a few weeks ago that they have ceased development on anything that isn't directly related to Firefox!

Camino is based on Gecko, the engine which powered Mozilla (and Firefox), but it is not based on Mozilla itself. Camino is an official Mozilla project, and was not killed off when the suite was.

You don't have to take my word on this, however. Consider Josh Aas and Mike Pinkerton, the two biggest Camino developers (the former of which is actually employed by the Mozilla Foundation). When they say it's not dead, odds are it's not dead.

[Zimphire]

Originally Posted by Severed Hand of Skywalker

For Mac I would definitely say Safari 1.3 or 2.0.

2.0 is so much faster than anything I have used it is crazy.

Many just say Firefox because it is fashionable to do so. It was faster before safari 1.3 but not anymore.

What he said. Afer using 2.0 there isn't a browser out there that beats it. Esp for speed of rendering.

[Randman]

Firefox is much better on the Windows side. OW isn't bad but I can't see paying for a browser unless it's so much better than anything put there, and OW isn't at that stage.
If Safari 2.0 is even better than 1.3, it's the clear favorite.

At the very least, with all the competition, it's us OSX users who are the big winners. Thank God no one is trying to push IE.

[driven]

Originally Posted by Randman

Firefox is much better on the Windows side. OW isn't bad but I can't see paying for a browser unless it's so much better than anything put there, and OW isn't at that stage.
If Safari 2.0 is even better than 1.3, it's the clear favorite.

At the very least, with all the competition, it's us OSX users who are the big winners. Thank God no one is trying to push IE.

I like IE. <GRIN> (Ducking for cover)

Seriously though you bring up a great point: On the Windows side there really was not very much competition for a very long time. IE 6 remained (and remains) frozen in time.

I'm convinced that if not for Firefox (Windows) that IE 7 would have never begun development.

[Macola]

Originally Posted by Zimphire

What he said. Afer using 2.0 there isn't a browser out there that beats it. Esp for speed of rendering.

Does 2.0 have real cookie management (like Camino and Firefox)? Not trolling, just curious...

[loki74]

I like Safari's functionality and integration better, but Firefox's features and expandability own. I'll take a look at Camino; never really used it. The main reason I went over to Firefox is cause I liked it on PC, and for some reason Safari wouldnt let me log into one of my client's website manager to work on/update their site... some kind of IP error (maybe i'll post a question on it...)

But the expandability of Firefox is great. As for not being "authentially OSX" or whatever? ha! try running Animation:Master. A:M still has a classic Win32 MDI, only minus the bg. Theres a satus bar on the bottom of the screen.... the toolbars dock, and they still have those ugly-ass grip things at the ends that you are supposed to drag them by... I mean, I love the software, but man.... so in contrast, I can live with Firefox.

just my 2 cents...

[Xeo]

Ooo, the new safari opens PDFs in the browser window natively.

[Zimphire]

I am a pretty anal retentive about GUI, I guess that is why I have used Safari. I tried Firefox, and while it was somewhat faster, I still liked Safari better.

Now with 2.0, I would say Safari renders pages a bit faster.

[Thain Esh Kelch]

Camino nightlies, definately. Beats the crap out of everything out there.

[driven]

So far I can't find any other browser that let's me use the rich-text editing abilitys of GMail,other than Firefox.

That said: I like Safari better for just about everything else.

I'd bet that Safari would work with GMail *IF* I could get it to tell GMail that it was Firefox. (How can we spoof the string in Safari? There has to be a way!)

[P]

I'd like to use Safari, but for now the flashblock extension keeps me in Firefox (G5).

[the_glassman]

I've used them all including the newer Safari's but continue to use the Altivec/G4 optimized build of Firefox with some personal tweaks. It's still the fastest browser on my over clocked G4. The extensions work great and I don't mind the styling especially with some of the Mac oriented themes. It's got everything the other browsers offer me and more.

[mrmister]

Nightly Camino optimized for G4 with Flashblock and all the fixings.

[cmoney]

Just my 2 cents:

I started out loving Camino, but it seems sorta dead, and if it's not, it's on a much longer development cycle compared to Firefox and even Safari. It's too bad, I'd probably prefer Camino over Firefox otherwise.

I then completely switched to Firefox about 3 months ago after constantly being frustrated by Safari. Safari was slow with lots of things, scrolling extremely long pages, typing on the macnn forums with the animated smileys. One major thing that got to me was how pages would stop loading when web bugs like images from ads.doubleclick.com wouldn't load up.

Firefox has been great other than a few occasional quirks, like you can't open a new window when the download manager has focus (and if you don't have any browser windows to switch to, you're SOL until your download finishes and you can close the DL manager!), holding the mouse button brings up the contextual menu, but there's no way to turn that off even if you have a 2 button mouse, etc. Firefox 1.x just feels unfinished and unrefined, which I guess comes with open source software . I've taken advantage of the extensions though and I'm completely dependent on a few of them like the Scrapbook.

I'm now on Tiger and Safari 2 has seen a good deal of improvement. It's still a little slow on long web pages but it seems to be manageable and I don't have to put up with Firefox's quirks. After 1 day of use, Safari 2 has earned a place back on my Dock!

Things I love about Safari:
-Integrated form field completion
-Adobe Acrobat 7 plugin works directly in browser
-no quirks/bugs like in Firefox - more refined
-Save as Web Archive can replace Firefox Scrapbook for me.
-Easier, more passive bookmark syncing, integrated with .Mac
-Live spell checking
-Seemingly better pop up blocking than Firefox
-Intelligent scroll behavior (when you're over a scrollable text field, it scrolls that first, when it gets to the bottom of that field, it scrolls the rest of the page. with Firefox, it only scrolls whatever has focus)

Hmmm, I think I may have just convinced myself to go back to Safari for the majority of my browsing and using Firefox as my backup...

[Stecchino]

Might as well add my 2 cents...

Safari 1.3 seems VERY quick to me as does FireFox 1.0.3--both featuring a good speed boost over their previous versions, IMHO.

I haven't tried Camino in a long time and I just downloaded the latest this afternoon (I also downloaded ExtraPref "extension" and enabled HTTP pipelining).

CONCLUSION,
As far as pure speed goes, it's really hard to tell the difference between the latest builds of these 3.

I'm just happy. From what I can tell, we have 3 blazing-fast browsers to choose from. I can understand why people get emotional and heated in their discussion, but there's really no reason to be overly-evangelistic about your favorite browser. Tell what you like and what you don't like, but leave it at that.

For each one his own. If saying that these 3 browsers are approximately the same speed-wise is a fair statement, then the only question to ask is what features matter to YOU the most?

By the way, I just tried a new browser on VersionTracker. You should check it out. It's got the incredible feature-set of OmniWeb, the find-text-as-you-type searching of FireFox and Camino, the speed of Safari, the 3rd party extensions of FireFox. It's incredible. It's called Stecchino.

[Stecchino]

By the way, does SafariSpeed make any performance increase in Safari 1.3 or 2.0? I know it did in previous versions.

[radii_22]

I prefer Safari, but I got to say that I use Firefox when I got to check compatibility issues and crossplatform. Firefox is not so bad in the Mac, I thik that it is more pretty in Mac that in PC.

With respect of Safari, does Safari 2.0 supports a "Get Info" feature? Safari bookmarks are the worst default of Safari in Panther, they are lame indeed. It could be nice two more fields in the bookmark registry : a keyword field, and a creation/last visited field (with the check activity option). Without that, it is almost stupid to have bookmarks that we don't know if they are active.

Regards.

[Millennium]

A note by the way on standards support. The currently-released versions of Firefox (1.0.3) and Safari (1.3/2.0) are about even; each supports a few things which the other doesn't, and neither is perfect.

However, both have very recently talked about features in the next release which make this a much more difficult call. On Safari's side, WebCore can now be made to pass the Acid2 test, which will make it the most CSS-compliant browser out there once the release is out. However, Firefox just switched SVG support on by default in its most recent nightlies, making it the first browser to support this technology natively (I'm not sure about XHTML/SVG hybrid markup, though I know this is planned and I eagerly await it).

I give a slight edge to Firefox at this point, but only because you can actually get nightlies, which you can't do with WebCore. Dave Hyatt -the main WebCore developer- has made source-code patches for Acid2 support available on his weblog, but these don't do much good since the source for the WebCore version that goes along with them has not yet been released, and so there is nothing to patch.

[TribeLeader]

First, i agree, it's mostly a matter of personal preference.

I've been a Mac user for 1.5 years. I used Safari at first, then used Firefox for a few months, and have recently switched back to Safari. This last switch has given me the opportunity to make some comparisons. Here are a few things I like about each (IOW, these are just my personal preferences) ...

Firefox 1.0
keyword shortcuts
ability to open pop-up windows in tabs
extensions and customization
search from address bar
downloads windows closes upon completion
find/highlights words on page
Ad blocker

Safari 1.3
faster/snappier (opening application)
Mac native (e.g. I like drop-down menus better)
spell check as you go
built-in tab delete button
respects the dock
tabbing through text boxes easier, in my experience
better keyboard functioning when switching through between tabs (FF gets hung up and I have to click on the application to continue using the shortcuts) -- don't know if that makes sense, but that's the best I can do.

I like both. As I said, right now, I'm using safari except where I want to use rich text editors (typepad, eventually Gmail). I will check out both the next versions of each as I am able to.

[driven]

Just curious as to my interpretation of this:

What does "respect the dock" mean?

[Millennium]

Originally Posted by driven

Just curious as to my interpretation of this:

What does "respect the dock" mean?

As I understand it, "respecting the dock" means that you don't allow the window to zoom or resize to the point where it's under the Dock, no matter where the Dock might currently be placed. Obviously, a user can resize the window and then later move it under the Dock, but in that case all bets are off.

I haven't heard that phrase in a long time, though.

[TETENAL]

Originally Posted by Millennium

I haven't heard that phrase in a long time, though.

Firefox respects the Dock as far as I understand that phrase. Internet Explorer doesn't respect the Dock and this is a major cause of annoyance.

[Millennium]

If you're waiting for IE/Mac to respect the Dock, you're going to be waiting a long time indeed. Microsoft stopped developing that browser shortly after the release of Safari, and they recently stopped developing MSN/Mac (its pay-up-front successor). It will likely never see another update.

[webraider]

I was slow to adopt any use of Safari as Apple has pulled the plug before on it's web browser Development. I have been using FireFox exclusively until I updated to OS X 3.9 from 10.2.8 a few months Ago. I know I'm late but this leads me to an important observation. Although the current release of Safari in 10.3.9 will finally access my web banking page and do everything I need it to do... It still doesn't include the latest technologies. FireFox is the only browser that does. I have to upgrade my OS to get the next version of Safari unless Apple offers free updates which they have been slow to do.

I like Safari's tabbed browsing better than FireFox's but FireFox is more stable. I like the idea that FireFox is widely being used on the Mac and Windows meaning that it should not only conform more to standards, but that it could help to forge those standards. For this reason I use both. At the moment, Safari is my default web browser, but that may change if I don't upgrade to OS 10.4 any time soon. For those critics out there who might condemn me for that... Upgrading does take a lot of time and money... You have to update your software, and alot of the apps that are running on it and there aren't available updates for all of my audio apps yet. Upgrading is a slow process for me and 10.3.9 does it's job very well for me. I don't see the point in upgrading to 10.4 to get RSS features in Safari. I can get that in a free download of FireFox. If Apple really wants to be serious about competing... they'll loosen up and alow free downloads of the latest version of their web browser... and introduce a windows version too (like itunes).

[Randman]

With Safari 2.0, it's not even a competition anymore.

[bmedina]

Originally Posted by Randman

With Safari 2.0, it's not even a competition anymore.

Yes it is.