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gangster · Oct 25, 2005, 10:19 PM

i am a recent convert to mac with a used dual 800 g4 and tiger. i have been using safari and have read that firefox/t-bird is "better". i went to download them but noticed camino, which i assume is like mozilla, and mozilla was a major headache on my win2k box. so, i realize there is alot of info archived on this forum about this in general, but can you suggest to me (summarize) a good/bad choice to replace safari? is camino a bad work in progress? will firefox/t-bird be a signicant improvement?

thanks in advance!

Randman · Oct 25, 2005, 10:24 PM

Been covered in depth in many, many threads. You'll find more info searching.

Personally, I prefer Safari 2.0.

gangster · Oct 25, 2005, 10:30 PM

is safari 2.0 what i have built in or is it a separate download? i have tiger and updates from mac.

Randman · Oct 25, 2005, 10:34 PM

Yes, you have Safari 2.0 in Tiger.

mduser63 · Oct 25, 2005, 11:54 PM

I switched from Safari 2.0 to Camino last week. In some ways I do like Safari better, but Camino is much faster, so for now I'm using it. I consider it a very viable replacement for Safari. It's not quite as full-featured, but very close, and as a work-in-progress, I'm sure it will get better in the future.

crazyjohnson · 12:56 AM

Personally I think Firefox and Camino are faster. I also just checked out Camino again after a long break. Take a look at the G4 optimized builds. The latest nightly builds just upgraded to the newest Mozilla Gecko engine.

There are also some G5 builds out there for Firefox.

CaptainHaddock · Oct 26, 2005, 04:09 AM

In a nutshell:

1. Safari is fast and designed for ease of use.

2. Camino is even faster, and it uses the Mozilla (gecko) rendering engine. Still has a few rough edges.

3. Firefox is the most flexible with its extensions, but it's also the slowest and quirkiest of the three because it's not a native Cocoa application. Also, some people (like me) don't like the custom buttons and form widgets.

I use Safari, but Camino is my back-up. Firefox doesn't behave like a good Mac application, so I rarely use it.

Millennium · Oct 26, 2005, 06:34 AM

The fact that Firefox is not "native Cocoa" is utterly meaningless. It is used as an argument against its use only by zealots who don't understand what Cocoa is, does, or means. There are valid reasons to go with one browser over another, but whether or not it uses "native Cocoa" is not one of them.

This said, the nightly builds of Safari have already overtaken Firefox in terms of standards support, and the gap is widening, as the Firefox developers seem to have lost their sense of priorities. If you can get the nightly builds of Safari, use them. Otherwise, use Firefox.

angelmb · Oct 26, 2005, 07:12 AM

Safari 2 and iCab 3 (www.icab.de) work for me.

CaptainHaddock · Oct 26, 2005, 08:39 AM

Originally Posted by Millennium

The fact that Firefox is not "native Cocoa" is utterly meaningless.

You say it's meaningless; is there a better way to explain it? I see that Firefox is missing basic features any browser designed on and for OS X would have - and such a browser would use Cocoa these days, would it not? Firefox uses its own drawing APIs for buttons and widgets instead of the prettier Cocoa APIs (is there anything uglier than a Firefox radio button?). And it's slower. These deficiencies annoy me and others.

ghporter · Oct 26, 2005, 08:51 AM

Just because Firefox doesn't have features you're used to seeing in a Mac browser doesn't mean it isn't designed for OS X. It in fact IS designed for both OS X and Linux (with the Windows implementation being the oddball).

Compared to Camino, Firefox may be "slow," but I find it significantly faster than Safari under Panther, and it is, as noted, more flexible than most other browsers too.

JKT · Oct 26, 2005, 12:33 PM

Man, I wish people would stop asking this question as it always leads to this pissing contest between the Safari users and Firefox users and the ... etc. There is only one sure fire way to know if a particular browser is better for you or not - download them all, try them all for a while and pick the one that best suits the way you browse... you can even use all of them at the same time! Personally, I don't like Safari, Firefox, iCab, Mozilla, Opera or Camino - each is very lacking for me in one way or another, and although I would prefer to use a faster renderer - OmniWeb is still by far and away the best browser for me and the way I use the internet. However, as you can see there are others who don't use OmniWeb because they think something else is better. Does that require me to call them losers or words to that effect... no, because everyone browses the web for different reasons and in different ways and that requires using a different tool to others.

In anycase, there is only one incontrovertible browsing fact - Internet Explorer SUCKS

ghporter · Oct 26, 2005, 05:33 PM

JTK, that's the best exposition of the subject I've ever seen! And I heartily second your statement about IE: it sucks like deep space (on any platform you want to try it on, too).

I settled on the browser I use pretty much the way JTK mentioned. Look around, try a bunch of them (even Opera is free now), and stick with the one you like best (or hate least). But knocking browsers you don't like is just saying you don't like them, and that doesn't mean anything about how others feel abou them-or about how well they're built (except for IE, of course

)

philcozz · Oct 26, 2005, 07:06 PM

I like Opera 8.5.

- - e r i k - - · Oct 26, 2005, 08:24 PM

I would use the nightly builds of Safari if Saft supported them. Safari + Saft is the ultimate browser for mac.

christianclark · Oct 29, 2005, 02:05 AM

Originally Posted by - - e r i k - -

I would use the nightly builds of Safari if Saft supported them. Safari + Saft is the ultimate browser for mac.

Camino and Omniweb are my favorites.

Firefox and Opera are my secondaries.

Christian

macforray · Oct 29, 2005, 08:11 PM

It depends on your type of browsing preferences. They all have their pros and cons. I use Safari, Firefox and Camino. I use the current Beta builds of Firefox and Camino. Camino is the fastest, but Firefox has more features and is easy to customize to my preferences by installing themes and extensions that work for "me". I haven't tried Opera in a in a couple of years, but hear both pros and cons. In todays world of open source you should be able to have cake and eat it too. No money to spend so all that is spent is your time, and the result should render greater satisfaction on your part.

Have fun.

Tesseract · Oct 29, 2005, 08:18 PM

Originally Posted by ghporter

IE: it sucks like deep space (on any platform you want to try it on, too).

I used to use IE6 under WINE on my Linux box (233MHz K6, 48MB) since it was faster than Firefox. (Firefox and XFree86 didn't fit into memory together - my disk got quite a workout.)

On the Mac, I usually use Safari. Camino is my backup. Firefox is in my Applications folder, but I rarely use it.

gangster · Oct 29, 2005, 08:36 PM

thanks for all the input! i have been messing with them all for a few days now and decided to stay with safari 2.0 even though omniweb seemed the best to me. i cant see buying a browser for a small personal preference and omni requires that.

be safe all.

Amorya · Oct 29, 2005, 11:24 PM

Originally Posted by Millennium

The fact that Firefox is not "native Cocoa" is utterly meaningless. It is used as an argument against its use only by zealots who don't understand what Cocoa is, does, or means. There are valid reasons to go with one browser over another, but whether or not it uses "native Cocoa" is not one of them.

Yes, it is.

Firefox tries to emulate the look and feel of the Mac, since it doesn't use native Cocoa (or whatever the carbon equivalent is) to draw the GUI. This leads to issues like the incorrect font in the contextual menus, the customise toolbar "sheet" being clumsy in the extreme, popup menus having scroll bars when they shouldn't, and many other such issues.

It is theoretically possible that Firefox could, in the future, contain specific enough custom code to emulate the MacOS look and feel 100%. I maintain this will never happen - it would be so much work to support every little ideosyncracy that is built into the MacOS, that the developers would have died of old age before they got it perfect.

I will be happy to eat my words if they ever get that close. My criterion for whether they have accomplished this is simple: if I actually have to examine specifically to see if the app uses native widgets, they have succeded. If it is obvious after five minutes' use that they do not, then they have failed.

Until Firefox passes that test, I will not use it. This is not to do with brand loyalty, but to do with consistency. I know through extended use how to predict exactly what effect an action (such as drag and drop, or text manipulation) will have, in apps that follow Apple's guidelines. If an app has a couple of exceptions to the general rule, I will learn them as exceptions and keep using the app. But if an application (like Firefox) rewrites the rules so drastically, and offers no improvement in user experience by doing so, I don't see why I should make the effort.

Amorya

CaptainHaddock · Oct 30, 2005, 09:35 AM

Thanks, Amorya. That was a very good way of explaining it.

ghporter · Oct 30, 2005, 11:21 AM

Facts and details are always helpful-and always beat opinions and speculation. Thanks, Amorya.

I still like Firefox, but maybe I should start bothering Mozilla.org to improve the way it works with OS X... Better operation and more seamless integration is always a Good Thing.

macanon · Oct 30, 2005, 08:14 PM

I had no idea about all of the differences. I am going to give Camino a shot. Firefox is bugging me lately.

Sarc · Oct 31, 2005, 03:36 PM

G4 optimized Firefox + AdBlock + Gestures + BugMeNOT + a nice OS X only theme = winning combo.

A fiend of mine sent me a bookmark of this site that updates a banner server list for adblock, if you update that list once in a while, youget a totally ad-free web.

bugmenot allows you to bypass compulsory site registration on -many- websites. imdb, slashdot, nytimes among others.

mouse gestures allows you to command the browser using just the mouse.