The great thing about these Living With articles –– and in fact the specific reason we do them –– is that we get to bring the real-world results of truly using software or hardware for a long time. As thorough as
MacNN is with reviewing new releases, that's like stress-testing a relationship in its infancy compared to moving in with someone. Living with them, long term, in fact.
We've noticed, though, that the act of writing about tools we've used so much for so long does tend to produce similar results. The Living With series tends to be quite positive, for example. That's far from always the case but usually if you've carried on using something for years upon years, it's not going to be something you hate.
Safari is different. We don't hate it, far from it, and for many of us it is our default web browser in every sense of the word. Yet unlike most Living With subjects, we live with Safari yet we have trysts with other browsers. Never Internet Explorer, come on. But Firefox and Chrome, yes.
Still, since Safari was released as a public beta in January 2003 and the formally became part of OS X with Panther in October that year, it's been on our Macs and it's been our default.
You have to remember that at the time we'd been using IE. We'll cheerfully agree that IE is vastly better now than it ever was, but back then in the ever was years, it was bad. Safari did seem like a cold glass of water in a bit of a desert.
What we're not quite sure about is when the complaining started but there's a chance it was on or about 1 November 2004 as that was when Firefox first came out. Firefox is a browser with fans and it had fans from the very, very start. Their arguments in favor of it include that it's lighter than Safari: that's a very hard thing to define but it's broadly to do with the feel of the software. An good comparison would be in writing tools: TextEdit is lighter than Microsoft Word.
Only, we don't agree.
Actually, we don't agree among ourselves either: browsers are weirdly personal tools considering they're made to be used by millions and don't really have all that many customisable bits. Yet to those of us who use, stick with and like Safari, we would argue the reverse. Safari seems lighter to us than Firefox. It also seems lighter than Chrome.
It's funny how there is a fashion in browsers: everyone used Netscape until they didn't and that was partly technical, partly a lack of alternatives, but there was an element of fashion too. Then for a long time Firefox was the browser to have, later that title went to Chrome. Most recently we're seeing Chrome criticised for how it eats your battery life but that's not new, is it? It's always done that.
What is at least fairly new is how often Firefox gets updated. The history of Firefox is a firestorm of beta releases and the history of Firefox is not the subject of this Living With but broadly you can say Firefox version 4 was released in 2011. We're now on Firefox version 38.
Every six weeks, Firefox gets a major revision to its version number and various actual changes. We're sick of it. Sick to the back teeth of firing up Firefox only to be forced to update something or wait for it to update something. We're a bit tired of it asking whether we would please like to make it our default browser, please. That feels heavy to us, not to mention needy, and that is a delay and a chore and a burden.
We had to look up what version Firefox was on but only because it changes so often. It changed while we typed that paragraph. We have to look up Safari's version number too –– it's now Safari 8 –– but we had to find that out because we never have to care. It gets updated, arguably it gets updated too slowly, but it's just there and we start it daily, we turn to it hourly, we study it minutely.
The fact that Safari is just there, is the default browser unless you change a preference on your Mac is certainly a big advantage to Apple. If the majority of Mac users are using Safari then it's down to how it's the default more than it is down to people making a positive choice to use it over the alternatives.
We make a positive choice, though. It is also our default in the sense that if we need to read something on the web, it is Safari that we want to use.
There are specific features you can point to: our favorite and most-used one is how on your Mac or iOS device you can see a list of the tabs you've got open on Safari on all your devices. Start reading something on your Mac and when you have to leave, carry on reading it on your iPhone.
Yet for us what matters the most in Safari is that we don't think about it much: we're more focused on the websites we're reading than the tool we're using to read them. Safari gets out of the way for us and we like that.
So we like Safari, some of us are sick of Firefox's incessant updates and Chrome may be fast but it needs to be because you get less time before your battery is dead. Yet still it is true: we live with Safari and we have flings with Firefox and Chrome.
We'd just be the same if we were living with those: we would dally with Safari.
The reason is that no one web browser handles all websites. They should all handle them all but in practice, we regularly hit ones that simply do not function properly under Safari but do under Firefox, for instance. When we hit one of those and especially if the problem wasn't obvious until we'd got through ten screens of entering information and credit card details for something, we have often stuck with Firefox afterwards.
Until we hit a site that Firefox trips over on.
Then we move back in with the browser we enjoy using. Safari is in our dock and it's what launches when we tap a certain key with Keyboard Maestro but both Chrome and Firefox version infinity are in our Applications folder.
-William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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