[The Godfather]

Safari was created to defeat IE and it did wonderfully. Should Safari be made open source already and all the good bits absorbed by the Mozilla project?

It is not like if Safari was scrapped, we'd be back on Explorer.

[Mastrap]

Competition is a good thing.

[ghporter]

And it comes straight from Apple, while Firefox is independent-and cross platform, so it has some quirks that Mac purists aren't crazy for.

I use Firefox, but I'd like to see Safari be better, particularly in speed and in handling the oddities that show up online (and cause Safari to fail to load a page that Opera, Firefox and Camino handle without a hitch). I'd also like to see some action to get more than standards compliance into Safari, which would make it easy for a user to visit lots of sites that are coded more for Windows/IE than "standards compliance."

[- - e r i k - -]

WebKit is already open source, So any advancement in Safari could easily (barring code-differences of course) be picked up by any team, including mozilla.

Mac users caring about integration and user interface choose Safari over Firefox.

[Jawbone54]

Originally Posted by Mastrap

Competition is a good thing.

Definitely

IE needed a swift kick in the butt. Safari needs to learn a few things from Firefox, and vice versa. Competition is going to give us some great innovation.

[production_coordinator]

I'm a Safari user. IMHO, as long as it's not IE, it's OK by me.

[d4nth3m4n]

i'd go to firefox if two things were changed- easier to change between tabs with a key combo (you try hitting crtl-pageup on an apple laptop...) and spell check.

[abe]

Originally Posted by production_coordinator

I'm a Safari user. IMHO, as long as it's not IE, it's OK by me.

[greenamp]

Originally Posted by d4nth3m4n

i'd go to firefox if two things were changed- easier to change between tabs with a key combo (you try hitting crtl-pageup on an apple laptop...) and spell check.

qft

[Ron Goodman]

Firefox isn't just doesn't feel like a Mac program to me--I use it when I have to, but don't much care for it. As an alternative to Safari, I prefer Camino.

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by The Godfather

Safari was created to defeat IE and it did wonderfully. Should Safari be made open source already and all the good bits absorbed by the Mozilla project?

Abracadabra! Safari is now open-source. Marvel at my mad skillz.

Anyway, Safari has some things on Firefox. It feels much smoother to me. In Firefox, keyboard focus is always drifting into some kind of limbo, so I always have to click to switch tabs or scroll. Safari also uses all the native goodies like live spell checking.

[Kerrigan]

:gasp: genie!

i wish for ie7 for mac

[dreamryche]

I like Safari and use it 99% of the time. There are about three sites I need to access that either don't work at all or are quirky in Safari. I use Camino for those...I don't really care for Firefox on OS X. I swore by FF when I was still using Windoze, though.

[CharlesS]

The reason Firefox is getting so much press is not because it's good, although it is, but rather that it's not IE, which is really really bad.

Safari is also not IE, and frankly both browsers have their own strengths and weaknesses, and regardless of what any of the zealots on here say, neither is provably better than the other.

[Salty]

I go with Safari just because it feels more like a Mac app. I use my keyboard for more than writing and Safari works best for that. If I need to check how something's gonna look in Firefox I use Camino. I keep Firefox on here... but not really because I need it. I never encounter sites that Safari chokes on... then again I don't browse to that many places right now that aren't decently geeky so they all are designed intelligently. Only site that really makes Safari choke ever is MySpace... and well that's because it's Satan.

[ambush]

safari rocks

[Gamoe]

Originally Posted by Jawbone54

IE needed a swift kick in the butt. Safari needs to learn a few things from Firefox, and vice versa. Competition is going to give us some great innovation.

As was said, competition is a good thing! Firefox has gotten and will continue to get good things just because Safari is there and visa-versa.

For example, Safari got tabs only quite a while after Firefox did-- would it have them today if Firefox hadn't put it out there beforehand?

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by ghporter

And it comes straight from Apple, while Firefox is independent-and cross platform, so it has some quirks that Mac purists aren't crazy for.

I use Firefox, but I'd like to see Safari be better, particularly in speed and in handling the oddities that show up online (and cause Safari to fail to load a page that Opera, Firefox and Camino handle without a hitch). I'd also like to see some action to get more than standards compliance into Safari, which would make it easy for a user to visit lots of sites that are coded more for Windows/IE than "standards compliance."

Safari seems to have problems with some modern standards compliance too. Specifically, some AJAX routines don't seem to work properly.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by CharlesS

The reason Firefox is getting so much press is not because it's good, although it is, but rather that it's not IE, which is really really bad.

Safari is also not IE, and frankly both browsers have their own strengths and weaknesses, and regardless of what any of the zealots on here say, neither is provably better than the other.

It depends on what your metric is. If it is with page compatibility and standards compliance, Gecko is provably better.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Salty

I go with Safari just because it feels more like a Mac app. I use my keyboard for more than writing and Safari works best for that. If I need to check how something's gonna look in Firefox I use Camino. I keep Firefox on here... but not really because I need it. I never encounter sites that Safari chokes on... then again I don't browse to that many places right now that aren't decently geeky so they all are designed intelligently. Only site that really makes Safari choke ever is MySpace... and well that's because it's Satan.

The Wordpress WYSIWYG editor doesn't work in Safari, nor does the Zimbra web client. Both are very heavy into AJAX.

[Millennium]

WebKit -the rendering engine, analogous to Gecko in Firefox- is already open-source. The two engines apparently share quite a bit of code, in fact.

[scaught]

i use safari at home (on my powerbook) and firefox at work (on my thinkpad). before safari, i used a bunch of different browsers (camino for a stretch there). since safari came out ive used it exclusively. no need to use anything else.

[tooki]

Originally Posted by d4nth3m4n

i'd go to firefox if two things were changed- ... and spell check.

It has spell check.

Right in the Edit menu, it has a Spelling submenu.

tooki

[Millennium]

Originally Posted by tooki

It has spell check.

Right in the Edit menu, it has a Spelling submenu.

Really? I don't see it, and I'm on the latest Trunk nightlies.

However, the latest Trunk nightlies do have inline spellchecking, for those who truly want to lean on such a thing rather than proofreading their posts. I don't recommend the Trunk nightlies to anyone but the truly brave, however, for other reasons.

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by besson3c

It depends on what your metric is. If it is with page compatibility and standards compliance, Gecko is provably better.

Didn't Safari get the ability to pass some of those Acid tests before Firefox?

[Person Man]

Originally Posted by ghporter

I'd also like to see some action to get more than standards compliance into Safari, which would make it easy for a user to visit lots of sites that are coded more for Windows/IE than "standards compliance."

If they did that, there would be no incentive to code sites that conform to the standards.

We should be putting pressure on the people who code websites to code them properly, rather than forcing Safari to conform to IE's non-standards.

[wataru]

Originally Posted by CharlesS

Didn't Safari get the ability to pass some of those Acid tests before Firefox?

Yes, but Acid is not the end-all-be-all of compliance metrics. In fact it seems to have little bearing on real-world performance in that area, since Firefox remains more compatible than Safari.

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by Kerrigan

i wish for ie7 for mac

-t

[olePigeon]

Safari is open source. The core HTML rendering engine (WebKit) is an open source project. Whenever Apple updates Safari, they post updates to WebKit.

Another browser that uses WebKit is OmniWeb.

The latest build includes integrated SVG support. So I'd imagine that the Safari in Tiger (or possibly the next update to Safari) will have built-in SVG support without the need of a plugin, extension, or reader from Adobe.

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by wataru

Yes, but Acid is not the end-all-be-all of compliance metrics. In fact it seems to have little bearing on real-world performance in that area, since Firefox remains more compatible than Safari.

Specifically, Acid2 was designed to expose those things that most browsers were bad at. Since Firefox was bad at those things, nobody would use them on a Web site.

[tooki]

Originally Posted by Millennium

Really? I don't see it, and I'm on the latest Trunk nightlies.

Could it be something enabled by PithHelmet or the Debug menu?

tooki

[Millennium]

Originally Posted by tooki

Could it be something enabled by PithHelmet or the Debug menu?

Oops; you're talking about Safari. I misunderstood, and thought you were talking about Firefox. My bad.

[Tomchu]

Firefox ... good?

Anything that leaks memory like a sieve and has rendering problems (ever refresh a page in Firefox and have it render differently?) is not "good".

[ambush]

Safari could be even better (SafeBrowsing) if Google would let me release my SafeBrowsing Extension!



Heck, it's sexier than Firefox!

[wataru]

Originally Posted by Tomchu

Anything that leaks memory like a sieve

No such problems here. Maybe you have some bad extensions installed.

and has rendering problems (ever refresh a page in Firefox and have it render differently?)

No. Care to give us an example of a site that shows this behavior?

[Tomchu]

Originally Posted by wataru

No such problems here. Maybe you have some bad extensions installed.

No. Firefox's memory leaks were the reason I stopped using it. One day, when I found Firefox 1.5 using 500 MB of *physical* RAM on my Athlon 64 with 2 GB of RAM, I dumped it completely. That was unacceptable.

http://www.google.com/search?q=firefox+memory+leak

Originally Posted by wataru

No. Care to give us an example of a site that shows this behavior?

Slashdot had such problems. Heck, the table columns on my own forum would be extra wide on one load, and then when you hit refresh, they'd snap back into their proper widths. I've experienced countless examples, but since I haven't used Firefox in months, I can't really give you URLs at the moment.

[Kr0nos]

I tried Safari for a couple of hours today after using Camino exculsively for the last year or so. After a short while I went right back to Camino. Safari seemed slow…unstable and generally less responsive.

I just hope the new version will offer some improvement in terms of speed, - but then, I'm not running it on an Intel processor. Probably makes all the difference.

Anyway, I think I'll be sticking with Camino until I get my MacBook Pro.

[Eug Wanker]

Safari leaks memory worse than Firefox IMO.

[Angus_D]

Originally Posted by Millennium

WebKit -the rendering engine, analogous to Gecko in Firefox- is already open-source. The two engines apparently share quite a bit of code, in fact.

They do? I can't see how that'd be the case.

[Millennium]

I'm not all that sure either, to be honest. I'm just going by what Dave Hyatt has said, and he's written a lot of code for both engines. I'm sure that not all of his code is the same, of course, but there's probably some.

Apparently WebKit itself is under the LGPL and BSD licenses. Gecko is under some strange GPL/LGPL/MPL tri-license, so there's at least one common license in between them. Legally, it may work out.

[zmcgill]

Originally Posted by Kr0nos

I tried Safari for a couple of hours today after using Camino exculsively for the last year or so. After a short while I went right back to Camino. Safari seemed slow…unstable and generally less responsive.

You used Safari for a couple of minutes, and thought it was unstable? Did it quit on you several times in those couple minutes or what?

[Kr0nos]

Originally Posted by Gossamer

You used Safari for a couple of minutes, and thought it was unstable? Did it quit on you several times in those couple minutes or what?

Err, I wrote 'a couple of hours', - and yes, it did quit (and freeze up) on a few occasion, where Firefox and Camino didn't have a problem.

[Jawbone54]

I've begun to prefer Safari over Firefox for Mac over the past few weeks. Safari felt a little smoother for some reason. The only thing I don't like is that when you Command-click on a favorite in the drop down menu, it doesn't open a new tab for it like in Firefox. Is there a way to fix this?

[zmcgill]

Originally Posted by Kr0nos

Err, I wrote 'a couple of hours', - and yes, it did quit (and freeze up) on a few occasion, where Firefox and Camino didn't have a problem.

Woah...I need to work on my reading comprehension...
The only time Safari is slow for me is when I'm using my school's WebMail. It locks up for a couple minutes while it loads my 2000 odd messages. But the same happens in IE, Firefox, etc, so it's not really Safari's fault.