Firefox vs. Safari

[clevin]

What the heck are "mouse/trackpad gestures" anyway? I never used them - in fact I've never had a Mac that supported them out of the box.

mice gesture is when you can click and drag your mice within browser for a short distance toward all kinds of direction(s) to operate the browsers, such as backward, forward, open a tab, close a tab, goto home page, save page, zoom in, zoom out, etc, etc (the firegestures addon for firefox probably offers 100+ operations you can do)

from firegestures homepage

FireGestures is a Firefox extension which enables you to execute various commands with five types of mouse gestures:

* Mouse Gestures (Move mouse with holding right-click)
* Wheel Gestures (Scroll wheel with holding right-click)
* Rocker Gestures (Left-click with holding right-click and vice versa)
* Keypress Gestures (Mouse gesture with holding Ctrl / Shift key)
* Tab Wheel Gestures (Scrolling wheel on the tab bar)

that green line is real, as firegestures allows user to see the track of the mice movement.

trackpad gesture is when you can put fingers (currently 3) on trackpad and move them to operate browsers, its only available on newer mac lapstops, and firefox only supports it at version 3.1 beta.

Trackpad gestures can only do limited things, and so far, firefox 3.1 beta offers more gestures than safari on trackpad.

There is a system wide(?) plugin called multiclutch that can bring trackpad gestures to older version of firefox. But you still need newer macs that support such thing at hardware level.

 

[joaoferro37]

I use both if a application does not support Safari, I use Firefox.
That is why we have more than one browsers available for Mac.

 

[MotleyPete]

I just find Safari to be faster and I love a lot of the new Safari 4 stuff (like the tabs saving space by being on top and cover flow history/bookmarks for easily flipping through sites).

I like Firefox's add on support, but none of them are enough to drag me away from Safari. I keep it installed and up to date though, just in case I ever have a change of heart.

 

[dehory]

One very bizarre thing I've been noticing is that with weak wifi signals, sometimes Firefox will just sit there trying to load a page, while Safari will load it up quite zippily.

It's not just a matter of speed -- Firefox won't load anything at all and give me a time-out error, while Safari works! Same proxy settings (i.e. none) in both browsers. Beats me why it happens...

 

[MacAndy74]

Installed Firefox 3.0.10 after having some odd trouble with the latest Safari 4 Beta, and I'm happy to say that it's been very reliable for me. Plus, I love flagfox and flashblock - addons

 

[Syndacate]

One very bizarre thing I've been noticing is that with weak wifi signals, sometimes Firefox will just sit there trying to load a page, while Safari will load it up quite zippily.

It's not just a matter of speed -- Firefox won't load anything at all and give me a time-out error, while Safari works! Same proxy settings (i.e. none) in both browsers. Beats me why it happens...

I think your love for safari is clouding your judgement of browsers' speed.

I don't particularly believe that any browser, be it firefox nor safari will load the page "quite zippily" if the wifi signal is weak. Loading pages on weak wifi signals is a hit-miss game, sometimes they'll load up fine, other times they'll time out. It's the same damn request for information, through the same protocol, through the same encryptions (if any), through the same wires, through the same servers. The only thing that's different is the rendering engines, and I doubt you'd actually believe that firefox and safari both have the completed DOM trees, and that safari chooses to display the data and firefox doesn't.

Other than that, for the timeout, you're just looking at a different timeout value. Firefox has lots of options in its config file, I'd be surprised if timeout wasn't one of them.

 

[dehory]

I think your love for safari is clouding your judgement of browsers' speed...

It is completely inexplicable and implausible to me too. Like I said, it wasn't a matter of speed, but whether pages would actually load. I was sitting in a hotel room with a weak wifi signal. Both browsers were open, and consistently Safari would load pages while FF would just sit there and tell me that my connection wasn't working. This happened repeatedly over several days...

 

[MacAndy74]

and after the final release of Safari 4. I'm back to it. Glad that Apple moved the tabs back where they should be.

 

[jon08]

I've been using Firefox for years and I believed it was the best web browser around. It is neat-looking and has lots of nice add-ons. When I switched to Mac half year ago, I decided to give Safari a try though. I found it faster, yet due to its simplistic & boring look + dullness and sort of inconvenient buttons I decided to stick with FF.

However, during the course of these 6 months as a Mac user, I got to admit that FF on Mac definitely lacks compared to the PC one. There tend to be more spinning beach ball, web pages open more slowly, scrolling is sort of "bumpy" - not smooth, etc. Also, it takes forever to open on the first start-up. I hoped this was going to be fixed with FF 3.5, yet the speed issues among with "unsmoothness" still appears to be there.

Safari 4, on the other hand, opens in a matter of seconds on the FIRST launch, and thus beats FF in this aspect by light years. It also seems to open/load websites faster than FF, which I experienced first hand. For example, I had this website that had been loading for 5 seconds, and then I took that link and tried it in Safari, and bam - it opened almost instantaneously. All in all, unfortunately Safari beats FF in speed hands down. Upon realizing that, I decided to ditch FF for a while and switch to Safari.

Still, I wish Safari didn't look so dull and lackluster. The bookmarks bar especially looks boring compared to FF. It's just that the letters VS. the gray background's contrast kind of lacks, which makes everything look boring, unpleasant to the eye. (Just compare the FF one to this one, and you'll see what I'm talking about). I wish Apple could do something about Safari's interface.

Also, what bothers me about Safari is that they placed Refresh/Stop button to the very right of the address window. And lastly, there's no more blue progress bar, which I do miss.

 

[Syndacate]

I use webkit sometimes, I have been using it a lot as of lately as firefox has been littered with alerts/dialogs as I'm currently creating a set of extensions for it.

I've been VERY unhappy with some of webkit's performance, actually.

Some things, the text box appears ontop of other objects, I've seen this in a few forums, I'm not too thrilled about it - fine, small error, whatever.

Though one thing that was REALLY bothering me was my damn router. I was remote controlling my router and when I hit apply it would give me <router IP>/apply.cgi - server error. I couldn't figure out what was going on for the longest time, my router appeared to be working fine, turns out it was ONLY Safari/webkit. It works fine in Firefox, and even Internet Explorer. Though regardless how many times I do it, it fails every time in Webkit or Safari, and works every time in Firefox. This really annoys me, especially how much time I put into believing it was a problem with my router and not Webkit. I have a linksys router. Arg.

So between the remote control issues, the placing elements on top of one another issues, and the blurred sites sometimes (sometimes elements are overwritten, like it didn't render the site properly), I'm starting to get annoyed with Webkit. Though it does load up a lot faster than Firefox (but I keep my browser open all the time, and just hide the window, so it's not a big deal how long it takes the initial time) and I do see the difference in fonts now, and like Webkit's better.

It's still hard to tell which browser I like more, but I like the driving concept behind Firefox more than I do behind Webkit. Webkit/Safari is seeming to have too many rendering errors, which I usually don't mind. The control panel glitch problem with remote controlling my router really annoyed me, though.

I did like that the night they released Safari 4, the webkit nightly build had the tabs under the URL, Firefox style, unlike how they were going before though with the Chrome tab style, I'm happy they fixed that before they released Safari 4, I hated that style. Worked well on Chrome with the Windows UI, not so much with Safari with this UI.

 

[yanki]

I use Firefox and safari both many time. and i find both the best both have the his own features but safari is little faster the FF.

 

[AlexH]

I've used both browsers, in fact, for a while I kept going back and forth. In the end, I went with Safari. Photographs in Safari are rendered more accurately than in Firefox. As an amateur photographer, I'm always looking at photographs from Flickr and photoblogs, so I want a browser that can deliver accurate color.

 

[Syndacate]

I use Firefox and safari both many time. and i find both the best both have the his own features but safari is little faster the FF.

I find Safari stats up faster, but I don't agree that it loads pages faster, the rendering is about the same, in my opinion.

I've used both browsers, in fact, for a while I kept going back and forth. In the end, I went with Safari. Photographs in Safari are rendered more accurately than in Firefox. As an amateur photographer, I'm always looking at photographs from Flickr and photoblogs, so I want a browser that can deliver accurate color.

Care to elaborate on that? Or better yet, an example?

A photo isn't rendered, it's downloaded and displayed.

As for the "color" being different, I find that hard to believe.

See, each pixel has a hex code, each hex code corresponds with a different color, the color is universal per computer screen.

 

[xUKHCx]

I did like that the night they released Safari 4, the webkit nightly build had the tabs under the URL, Firefox style, unlike how they were going before though with the Chrome tab style, I'm happy they fixed that before they released Safari 4, I hated that style. Worked well on Chrome with the Windows UI, not so much with Safari with this UI.

Webkit did not change the UI, Safari did. When you download and run Webkit it uses Safari's interface just with the latest webkit engine.

Care to elaborate on that? Or better yet, an example?

That is pretty easy to do. Go here http://www.color.org/version4html.xalter

http://www.dria.org/wordpress/archives/2008/04/29/633/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/iilii-n/2128156665/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/goodfella/3523751770/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/desilhouette/3431847487/


Firefox 2 did not suport colour profiles in images which could cause pages to look odd if people had not paid attention when creating the website.

Firefox 3 does have colour profile support but it is not enabled by defailt because it reportidly gives a 10-15% performance hit. You can enable it via this add-on

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6891

or tweaking the about:config file.

A photo isn't rendered, it's downloaded and displayed.

As for the "color" being different, I find that hard to believe.

See, each pixel has a hex code, each hex code corresponds with a different color, the color is universal per computer screen.

Everything you see on your computer screen is rendered, why would photos be anything different.

 

[Aronnax]

Firefox 3 does have colour profile support but it is not enabled by defailt because it reportidly gives a 10-15% performance hit. You can enable it via this add-on

And Firefox 3.5 has color management by default and without any performance disadvantage - for example: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=444661

 

[Syndacate]

Webkit did not change the UI, Safari did. When you download and run Webkit it uses Safari's interface just with the latest webkit engine.

Ah, gotcha, didn't think about that.

That is pretty easy to do. Go here http://www.color.org/version4html.xalter

http://www.dria.org/wordpress/archives/2008/04/29/633/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/iilii-n/2128156665/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/goodfella/3523751770/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/desilhouette/3431847487/


Firefox 2 did not suport colour profiles in images which could cause pages to look odd if people had not paid attention when creating the website.

Firefox 3 does have colour profile support but it is not enabled by defailt because it reportidly gives a 10-15% performance hit. You can enable it via this add-on

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6891

or tweaking the about:config file.

I see, I didn't know about the lack of support.

Everything you see on your computer screen is rendered, why would photos be anything different.

Because I assumed that if the system supported the color profiles then the system's implementation of the underlying rendering lib would also support color profiles. Apparently this isn't the case.

EDIT:
Nvm about that last part, don't feel like cancelling this rip and rebooting into OS X to look at it, though XP only supports ver 2 according to that top link.

If XP doesn't have full support, and Chrome, IE, Firefox, and Opera all ignore it altogether, I can't really agree that it's that big of a deal. In terms of numbers of users, Chrome, IE, Firefox, and Opera > Safari

 

[xDYLANx]

And of course the Google Ad on the bottom of the page when I loaded it was a link to download IE8

Personally, the first thing I did when I got my Mac was download FF3 and I never used Safari until the 4 beta came out. I liked ti so much that I stopped using FF. But now that the Final version of 4 is out, I'm using both. Safari remembers my settings and passwords for web pages a lot better than FF does. but now that I've found a skin that makes it look exactly like the S4 Beta. I use it a lot too because it looks nicer with the tabs on top and the URL loading bar IMO

 

[Syndacate]

And of course the Google Ad on the bottom of the page when I loaded it was a link to download IE8

Personally, the first thing I did when I got my Mac was download FF3 and I never used Safari until the 4 beta came out. I liked ti so much that I stopped using FF. But now that the Final version of 4 is out, I'm using both. Safari remembers my settings and passwords for web pages a lot better than FF does. but now that I've found a skin that makes it look exactly like the S4 Beta. I use it a lot too because it looks nicer with the tabs on top and the URL loading bar IMO

Firefox and Safari both remember passwords just fine as long as you tell them to...as long as you have the right settings in Firefox enabled, I've never heard of it forgetting passwords or anything like that.

Ironically, I saw the same IE8 ad while reading your post, haha.

EDIT:
Also, some people don't want their stuff to be remembered, and have trouble getting it to that. For example, I don't want my browser to remember anything - bookmarks, history, cache, etc. and most importantly - NOT PASSWORDS. In my opinion, they're gaping security holes to valuable information, and Safari didn't hold up worth of jack at the last black hat get-together. The only thing I want ANY browser to remember is the home page and basic browser settings (such as always show tab bar, switch to new tabs immediately, etc.). I use incognito mode by default in Chrome in Windows, and in Firefox I can turn everything off and tweak it the way I like. Though in Safari you can't tell it to NOT remember history - you can set it to 1 day, that's about it. I had to lock the history file on a file system level to make Safari work the way I wanted it to...there's no reason for that, in my opinion. Firefox has thousands of tweaking options, and plenty of standard options without going into the config pane, though Safari has trouble getting a full set of basic ones. That's one of my let downs about Safari. Though once you clear and lock the history file on a file system level, Safari can't write to it, so it's all good. Though an end user wouldn't do that if he/she wanted settings similar to mine, which I think is wrong. I feel the options should be there. Though I guess that's one of my problems with apple in general, they make A LOT of assumptions about what you want - and sometimes, that's NOT what I want, and I can't change it without going around the whole thing. That was one example, another is going to sleep on lid close, I'd at least like the option to keep it running, but I have to use InsomniaX if I want that. I've heard that it may be a heat issue, but I'm using it right now in clamshell (external monitor, keyboard, and mouse) just fine and it has absolutely no heat issues. Real temp shows 35*/39* for each core and 58* for the GPU. Though I guess that's just a side effect of making it "just work" for the "normal" user. Though you should be able to make it work the way you want, if you're not a normal user.

 

[jon08]

How do you make Safari remember passwords on sites that don't offer you the "remember this password" option to tick?

FF always pops up the little tab asking you if you want it to remember the password, but Safari doesn't...

 

[xUKHCx]

If XP doesn't have full support, and Chrome, IE, Firefox, and Opera all ignore it altogether, I can't really agree that it's that big of a deal. In terms of numbers of users, Chrome, IE, Firefox, and Opera > Safari

Just like every feature of the different browsers it comes down to personal preference. No one browser is perfect, every browser will have some features missing or some that need improving it is a case of finding the one that fits your needs most. I personally don't like firefox's text rendering so do not use it. I'm sure that others prefer Firefox's text rendering in comparison to other browsers and use it.

 

[dirt farmer]

How do you make Safari remember passwords on sites that don't offer you the "remember this password" option to tick?

FF always pops up the little tab asking you if you want it to remember the password, but Safari doesn't...

Under Safari preferences, in the Autofill tab, check the "User names and passwords" box.

 

[jon08]

Under Safari preferences, in the Autofill tab, check the "User names and passwords" box.

But won't that automatically make it remember all the passwords without asking you whether or not you want it to remember?

EDIT: just tried it; works the way I wanted it to, thanks!

 

[clevin]

FF always pops up the little tab asking you if you want it to remember the password, but Safari doesn't...

thats not a popup, its a notification bar attached to the top of webpage.

Its a much better behavior than a popup asking you to remember passwords. Many times users forget the passwords or username, and they are not sure if the password should be remembered at all.

With the notification bar, users can interact with webpage without being forced to pick remember or not before they can be sure the username/password is correct. If the password turned out to be correct, they can then choose to remember it, if its wrong, they can try again without leaving a pair of incorrect username/password in the system.

 

[TuffLuffJimmy]

thats not a popup, its a notification bar attached to the top of webpage.

Its a much better behavior than a popup asking you to remember passwords.

Agreed. Apple sometimes tries to keep things too simple and it comes off very un-user-friendly.

 

[Syndacate]

Just like every feature of the different browsers it comes down to personal preference. No one browser is perfect, every browser will have some features missing or some that need improving it is a case of finding the one that fits your needs most. I personally don't like firefox's text rendering so do not use it. I'm sure that others prefer Firefox's text rendering in comparison to other browsers and use it.

Yeah, I suppose it is all preference, which is why this thread in the end is pointless, but discussing different aspects of each is still a factor. Also, I don't have any complaints with firefox except for its initial load time, and I don't completely quit my browsers very often so that hardly comes into play.

Agreed. Apple sometimes tries to keep things too simple and it comes off very un-user-friendly.

Yeah, that's pretty much my only real big tiff with Apple. Being a developer, there's lots of "more advanced" stuff I'd like to do and I always have to find hack ways around it, which in my opinion is stupid, it should at least offer the options. Though if you take into account the aim Apple went for, it makes sense. Still can't figure out why there's no cut/paste, though .