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Firefox vs. Safari
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Veltliner
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Apr 11, 2011, 02:39 AM
 
I'd like to know your opinions and ideas towards those two browsers.

I switched from Safari to Firefox after those reports of Safari security risks.

I think Firefox is a very good browser, but it Safari seems to be easier to use.

One example is bookmarking. You want a new bookmark to be in the toolbar. With Safari, no problem. With Firefox, it goes right to the end of the toolbar - you can't choose the spot. So you have to open the bookmark folder, and put it into its place by hand.

History: to access history in Firefox is a multi-step process. You only find the most recent items there, and you have to open the history tab.

Generally, maybe you can tweak Firefox. But I find it ridiculous that a browser needs a handbook to open up its features. Anybody can develop something complicated.

Safari has the typical Apple touch: everything is quickly accessible, and logical.

PS: How has that security problem come along? Is it safe to go back to Safari?
     
besson3c
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Apr 11, 2011, 03:21 AM
 
I think you should take the time to learn more about security problems like the one that scared you off and whether they affect you (and how) before making decisions involve switching...

You are probably safe to use any of the major browsers. If there was a massive problem that affected hordes of people it would have probably been fixed by now.
     
P
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Apr 11, 2011, 04:38 AM
 
Originally Posted by Veltliner View Post
One example is bookmarking. You want a new bookmark to be in the toolbar. With Safari, no problem. With Firefox, it goes right to the end of the toolbar - you can't choose the spot. So you have to open the bookmark folder, and put it into its place by hand.
In the URL bar, there is a small icon - either the favicon for the page, or a generic icon. You can drag that one directly to the toolbar.

Originally Posted by Veltliner View Post
PS: How has that security problem come along? Is it safe to go back to Safari?
Any security problem in particular? Apple fixed a HUGE batch of problems not too long ago - just before pwn2own, except the rules had been changed so the patched version wasn't used.
The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.
     
Spheric Harlot
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Apr 11, 2011, 05:08 AM
 
Firefox has always felt like a second-class OS X app. The menu naming in German is wrong, keychain access wasn't used forever, some update wouldn't even let you drag and drop an image to the Finder to save it, interface conventions aren't respected (not that they are much in Safari - address-bar cursor movement is one of the big annoyances), etc.

I've only kept it around for the default log-in to my second MySpace account (though I haven't accessed either in months now).

I haven't needed it as an alternative for pages that didn't work in Safari in literally years.
     
Oisín
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Apr 11, 2011, 05:22 AM
 
I haven't needed it as an alternative for pages that didn't work in Safari in literally years.
I wish I could say the same.

The CMS my university uses and the netbanking used by the badminton club where I play both don’t work properly in Webkit browsers, so Firefox (or Opera) it is.
     
Tee
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Apr 11, 2011, 06:16 PM
 
The real dangers are with the Adobe Flash plugin!

That being said.
There are lots of security issues with Safari, FireFox, Chrome, Flash, MacOS X, etc.

However, actually having a working exploit that takes advantage of a security flaw is quite rare for MacOS X.
     
Curiosity
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Apr 12, 2011, 01:16 AM
 
Firefox is a lot more configurable than Safari. You can tweak its settings, and they are easily accessible, you can increase its capabilities by adding extensions, and you can change its appearance with themes. Safari's cookie handling is primitive compared to most other browsers. It is still handling cookies the way Netscape did in the 90s.
     
besson3c
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Apr 12, 2011, 01:36 AM
 
Originally Posted by Curiosity View Post
Firefox is a lot more configurable than Safari. You can tweak its settings, and they are easily accessible, you can increase its capabilities by adding extensions, and you can change its appearance with themes. Safari's cookie handling is primitive compared to most other browsers. It is still handling cookies the way Netscape did in the 90s.
What is lacking in Safari's cookie handling?
     
AKcrab
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Apr 12, 2011, 01:45 AM
 
I thought people stopped thinking about cookies years ago.
     
besson3c
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Apr 12, 2011, 01:46 AM
 
Originally Posted by AKcrab View Post
I thought people stopped thinking about cookies years ago.

They are important for developers to have access to.
     
Spheric Harlot
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Apr 12, 2011, 01:53 AM
 
Originally Posted by Curiosity View Post
Firefox is a lot more configurable than Safari. You can tweak its settings, and they are easily accessible, you can increase its capabilities by adding extensions, and you can change its appearance with themes.
theming is not a feature, at least not on any of the themed FF installations I've seen so far.

Safari has supported extensions for a while now.

What relevant settings does FF allow that aren't available through Safari's developer menu (which is easily turned on)?
     
Veltliner  (op)
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Apr 12, 2011, 02:12 AM
 
Originally Posted by P View Post
In the URL bar, there is a small icon - either the favicon for the page, or a generic icon. You can drag that one directly to the toolbar.



Any security problem in particular? Apple fixed a HUGE batch of problems not too long ago - just before pwn2own, except the rules had been changed so the patched version wasn't used.
Thanks for the icon tip.

I don't remember what security problem it was. Probably a year and a half to two years ago - there was a discussion about it her on MacNN as well.
     
Veltliner  (op)
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Apr 12, 2011, 02:12 AM
 
Originally Posted by besson3c View Post
I think you should take the time to learn more about security problems like the one that scared you off and whether they affect you (and how) before making decisions involve switching...

You are probably safe to use any of the major browsers. If there was a massive problem that affected hordes of people it would have probably been fixed by now.
You are right about this.
     
Veltliner  (op)
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Apr 12, 2011, 02:16 AM
 
Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot View Post
Firefox has always felt like a second-class OS X app. The menu naming in German is wrong, keychain access wasn't used forever, some update wouldn't even let you drag and drop an image to the Finder to save it, interface conventions aren't respected (not that they are much in Safari - address-bar cursor movement is one of the big annoyances), etc.

I've only kept it around for the default log-in to my second MySpace account (though I haven't accessed either in months now).

I haven't needed it as an alternative for pages that didn't work in Safari in literally years.
They always had weird flaws in Firefox. Just until recently, when you selected five pages of a webpage you were coding, it would open five windows - tabs didn't work.

At another time, when 3.6 came along, color management was totally off.

I think Firefox is bogged down by features.

Apple has always gone the minimalist approach. You don't need a handbook to really use Safari. But you need one for Firefox.

That said, I got pretty used to Firefox. But nowt hat I hear that Safari hasn't more security risks than Firefox, I'll use Safari more.
     
besson3c
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Apr 12, 2011, 02:29 AM
 
Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot View Post
theming is not a feature, at least not on any of the themed FF installations I've seen so far.

Safari has supported extensions for a while now.

What relevant settings does FF allow that aren't available through Safari's developer menu (which is easily turned on)?

There are some cool Firefox extensions that do some things you probably can't find within other browsers. Not because it would be impossible to reproduce that functionality elsewhere, just that these add-ons happen to be Mozilla based.
     
besson3c
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Apr 12, 2011, 02:31 AM
 
Veltliner: my browser of choice is Google Chrome, it is worth checking out too.
     
Spheric Harlot
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Apr 12, 2011, 02:33 AM
 
Originally Posted by besson3c View Post
There are some cool Firefox extensions that do some things you probably can't find within other browsers. Not because it would be impossible to reproduce that functionality elsewhere, just that these add-ons happen to be Mozilla based.
Like what? Curious.
     
besson3c
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Apr 12, 2011, 02:41 AM
 
Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot View Post
Like what? Curious.

For a while Firebug did things that the Webkit dev tools didn't until they caught up (Chrome's did fairly recently), S3Fox is cool, DownloadHelper (I don't know if there is a Webkit equivalent), ColorZilla (provides a color picker for web dev), the Web Developer extension, FlashTracer, security tools such as TamperData, XMarks is nice, and MeasureIt is handy for web dev as well.

These are just some random extensions I have installed in Firefox. I'm too lazy to see which of these are available in Safari or Chrome in some sort of equivalent, I usually just use Firefox when I need this functionality. I'm pretty sure that at least a few of these are not available in Safari.

There are a toke load of Firefox add-ons, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if there were more Chrome extensions than Safari extensions too.
     
Spheric Harlot
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Apr 12, 2011, 03:14 AM
 
More = better = more useful?
     
pendragon
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Apr 12, 2011, 06:43 AM
 
For a year or more, Safari has scored 100% on the The Acid3 Test. But the best score I can get with FireFox is 97%. Perhaps it is inconsequential that FF does not score as well?

Also (if it matters), Safari still has a "moderate" memory leak; don't know if FF does.
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P
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Apr 12, 2011, 09:58 AM
 
The part of Acid3 that Firefox misses is support for SVG fonts. Mozilla has stated that since everyone has now decided to support the competing font format WOFF and the SVG working group has decided that fonts is a "non-core" part of the specification, they won't bother implementing the SVG fonts at all, and anyway Safari only implements a small subset of the spec and Opera doesn't even do that well, and those grapes are probably sour anyway...
The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.
     
besson3c
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Apr 12, 2011, 10:00 AM
 
Firefox was the last of the major browsers to support font embedding
     
Big Mac
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Apr 12, 2011, 02:26 PM
 
Has Firefox ever gained the ability to save single file web page archives? Does Chrome have that feature? The only browsers I know that definitely do are Safari on the Mac (I don't pay too much attention to the Win version) and Opera. Meanwhile I wish Opera would allow for proper image saving through drag 'n drop; the only browser that I've ever seen do that properly is Safari on the Mac (although SH indicates some Firefox builds get that right).

On Mac OS X I most often use Safari, while on Windows I enjoy the efficiency and featureset of Opera (although it has some strange site compatibility quirks especially with Amazon).
( Last edited by Big Mac; Apr 12, 2011 at 02:33 PM. )

"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." TJ
     
besson3c
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Apr 12, 2011, 03:12 PM
 
Chrome does have that feature.
     
Curiosity
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Apr 13, 2011, 01:11 AM
 
Originally Posted by besson3c View Post
What is lacking in Safari's cookie handling?
You cannot set a default and then make exceptions to it the way you can with IE, Opera, and Firefox. Safari still has only the 3 possible settings for cookies: block all, allow all, or allow only those from the site being visited. With Opera and Firefox, you can also specify if the exceptions are allowed any cookies or only session cookies.
     
besson3c
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Apr 13, 2011, 01:22 AM
 
Ahh, hadn't thought about that!
     
Curiosity
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Apr 13, 2011, 01:34 AM
 
Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot View Post
Safari has supported extensions for a while now.

What relevant settings does FF allow that aren't available through Safari's developer menu (which is easily turned on)?
There are a lot more extensions for Firefox than for Safari, and there is a lot more variety in what capabilities you can add with them.

With Safari's search box, you are limited to using Google only, unless you use Acidsearch (which always broke when Safari was updated), whereas you can add more search plugins into Firefox's search box, without adding any extensions.
Firefox allows more control over how multimedia is handled. You can choose to use plugins or helper applications. It is much easier to block favicons (for which I have no use) with Firefox. One can set up limits as to what Javascript is allowed to do with popups, cookies, window control with Firefox. For instance, I can force those popup windows which I allow to have such things as scrollbars, toolbars, location bar, status bar. I can set the application that will be used for protocols such as mms and rtsp with Firefox, whereas Safari will use only the system defaults, which do not work with all sites.
     
Spheric Harlot
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Apr 13, 2011, 05:14 AM
 
I see.

One problem I had with Firefox is that I'm forced to deal with a lot of that crap (none of which is of use to me - I'm just a "user" WRT the Intarwebz) by default.

For example, downloading a file presents me with window with options of what to do, and whether to remember it or just annoy me every time (which it does, by default).
     
Oisín
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Apr 13, 2011, 05:16 AM
 
With Safari's search box, you are limited to using Google only, unless you use Acidsearch (which always broke when Safari was updated), whereas you can add more search plugins into Firefox's search box, without adding any extensions.
Are you talking about the search box to the right of the address bar? ’Cause that’s not true, you can choose between Yahoo!, Bing, and Google in Safari without any extensions.
     
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Apr 13, 2011, 06:39 AM
 
Correct, but I'd like to search IMDB or Wikipedia or <insert wiki for some weird old game I'm currently replaying> directly from that box, like I can in Firefox. The fact that you can't add search engines is one of the few FF features that I miss in Safari.

I have switched browsers many times, back and forth between FF and Safari. Last time I switched to Safari it was because FF Javascript was so slow, but FF4 caught up in that respect. It's supposedly even slightly faster, but they're both fast enough that it doesn't really matter. The main hole card for Safari now is the ability to show H.264 video without Flash, but Flash has improved significantly in the last few versions. I guess they're mostly even now, with nothing really pushing me to switch one way or the other.
The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.
     
angelmb
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Apr 13, 2011, 08:59 AM
 
Originally Posted by Big Mac View Post
… The only browsers I know that definitely do are Safari on the Mac (I don't pay too much attention to the Win version) and Opera.


That's iCab 'Save as…'
     
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Apr 13, 2011, 10:07 AM
 
Originally Posted by Big Mac View Post
Has Firefox ever gained the ability to save single file web page archives? Does Chrome have that feature? The only browsers I know that definitely do are Safari on the Mac (I don't pay too much attention to the Win version) and Opera.
IE does that, since at least IE5. This may actually be one feature that IE was first with. Even more of a shocker - it's an RFC-documented standard called MHTML. As usual, there is an extension for Firefox that lets it both save and and open such archives.
The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.
     
Big Mac
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Apr 13, 2011, 11:49 AM
 
It's nice that iCab has so much flexibility in that department.

As for IE yes it was first to the party with web archives and had a great way of displaying them in IE 5, but today IE is so wretched even on Windows that I don't even consider it much of an option for anything.

"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." TJ
     
besson3c
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Apr 13, 2011, 02:27 PM
 
IE 9 is pretty good, but it is going to be hard for Microsoft to affect perceptions that have been formed about IE
     
Curiosity
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Apr 14, 2011, 01:17 AM
 
Originally Posted by Oisín View Post
Are you talking about the search box to the right of the address bar? ’Cause that’s not true, you can choose between Yahoo!, Bing, and Google in Safari without any extensions.
Gee, I did not notice that! I like Scroogle, Startpage, and Wikipedia, however, and with Firefox or Opera I can easily add those into the search box.
     
voodoo
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Apr 14, 2011, 09:13 PM
 
Originally Posted by besson3c View Post
Veltliner: my browser of choice is Google Chrome, it is worth checking out too.
I second that, it's a damn fine browser and very user friendly. Quick to respond and update for security exploits.

I still use Firefox and Safari as backup browsers, as Chrome doesn't support the Flip4Mac plugin (at the moment anyway)
I could take Sean Connery in a fight... I could definitely take him.
     
AccessoryGeeks
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May 4, 2011, 06:25 PM
 
Firefox. I use Firefox on my PC and I am rather used to it.
     
   
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