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Am I missing something? (Safari vs Firefox)

Timelessblur said:
Not recomended. There are a lot of IE only sites out there.
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you guys must have forgotten that you can download a safari plug-in that lets you say your using almost any browser out there. I have used the plug in to say im on a windows computer so i could look at the buymusic.com site. much like apples musicstore except its in a browser not a player. :)
 
corywoolf said:
you guys must have forgotten that you can download a safari plug-in that lets you say your using almost any browser out there. I have used the plug in to say im on a windows computer so i could look at the buymusic.com site. much like apples musicstore except its in a browser not a player. :)
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where can you download this plugin and what is it called?
 
wkw said:
where can you download this plugin and what is it called?
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It's not a plugin it's a GUI for turning on or off the debug menu. Within the Debugging menu is the options to select the browser you want Safari to emulate. It's set to automatic by default. This does not necessarily make it more compatible it just fools websites that are browser specific into letting you use a unsupported browser.
 
Literally trashing Safari seems a bit extreme...


Things I like about Firefox:

- I use Windows, Linux and MacOS X. FF is available for all of them and I prefer using the same app on all systems, if I can.

I do notice it when an app doesn't have the look and feel of the OS, but as long as it's not too different, it doesn't bother me.

- Extensions!

One of the many extensions I use is one that put a close button on each tab, like Safari. I'm not sure if there's a Mac version, as I just recently discovered the extension :)

- MacOS X: Click-and-hold to popup the context menu. Very useful on my Powerbook.

Things I don't like about Firefox:

- MacOS X: Scrolling is less smooth than Safari.


Most of the sites I visit are tech sites, and all of them are run by people aware of the existence of alternative browsers. Even my banking site display fine in both Safari and FF, so compatibility isn't really that much of an issue.

In terms of stability, they're fairly equal in my experience. Both have crashed their fair share... as longs as they don't drag the OS with them, I don't worry too much, although it's annoying if you have lots of sites open. I wish someone whould take a clue from Opera, since having Opera crash is *so* much less annoying, as it remember everything about your last session. Hm.. actually, IIRC, there's an extension for FF that have a similar function... and doesn't OmniWeb have something like that too?
 
CPU Usage

Hey, I just recently converted to FireFox, but I'm thinking about switching (back) to Safari for one reason: Idle CPU Usage. FireFox eats CPU while in the background if you keep windows open... What's up with this? Has anyone else noticed this? I can always quit and relaunch it if I want to, but I like to keep webpages open in the background... FireFox with like 3 windows open, but hidden and running in the background of Excel and Adium right now is eating 20% CPU, compared to Safari, with the SAME pages open in the background, eating 2%... Has anyone else experienced this? If yes, is there a workaround? Or should I go back to Safari, which seems to render slower and be less compatible? :confused:
 
MacBandit said:
It's not a plugin it's a GUI for turning on or off the debug menu. Within the Debugging menu is the options to select the browser you want Safari to emulate. It's set to automatic by default. This does not necessarily make it more compatible it just fools websites that are browser specific into letting you use a unsupported browser.
Click to expand...

I know pithhelmet has a button for enabling the debugging menu. I'm sure other plugins do too. I finally just tried it. This feature is very cool! It even seems to allow separate tabs to have different user agents, so only one tab is sending out MSIE 6.0 mojo to sites.

I noticed it lets you access Walmart's digital music store too. Hmmm...now this tempts me to start digging around into cracking WMA's DRM so that I could buy music that isn't in iTMS and use it on my iPod.... :eek:
 
mkrishnan said:
I know pithhelmet has a button for enabling the debugging menu. I'm sure other plugins do too. I finally just tried it. This feature is very cool! It even seems to allow separate tabs to have different user agents, so only one tab is sending out MSIE 6.0 mojo to sites.

I noticed it lets you access Walmart's digital music store too. Hmmm...now this tempts me to start digging around into cracking WMA's DRM so that I could buy music that isn't in iTMS and use it on my iPod.... :eek:
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Even if it's a plugin you realize it's still just a GUI front end for a behind the scenes feature already built into Safari.
 
MacBandit said:
Even if it's a plugin you realize it's still just a GUI front end for a behind the scenes feature already built into Safari.
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Yes, I did understand what you mean. But you need to use some plug-in or other to turn the menu on, don't you, or do you do it with applescript or by editing a dot file somewhere?

Anyway, FWIW it's a neat feature, so thanks for reminding me to finally check it out. :D
 
mkrishnan said:
Yes, I did understand what you mean. But you need to use some plug-in or other to turn the menu on, don't you, or do you do it with applescript or by editing a dot file somewhere?

Anyway, FWIW it's a neat feature, so thanks for reminding me to finally check it out. :D
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You can turn on the debug menu with a terminal command.
 
I use Safari on my ibook, Firefox on the windows box at work.
There are two features of Firefox that I'd love to see on Safari.
1) Firefox will warn you if you close a window with multiple tabs open. You can override this behavior if you don't like it, but I want it. Every once in a while I hit command-q instead of command-w, and there's no warning, no way to recover. POOF! everything goes away.
2) Firefox will let you bookmark a group of tabs. It's not as good as Netscape's implementation of that feature, but at least it's there.
 
not enthralled yet

i've used a couple revs of FF now, but keep coming back to safari. i still keep Exploder around for, like others have said, sites that safari barfs when encountering (my company's intranet, for instance).

i think my biggest complaint w/ FF so far is that the interface is really UGLY. will someone out there make a really nice, slick theme for FF already? all the ones i saw on their site sucked sideways (why in god's name do we need like 10 different colors of a catpaws theme??!?). has anyone come across a clean, modern theme for FF yet? please post.

also, there seems to be a big jump in font sizes. view the top level of this site side-by-side w/ safari. the 'mac links' column on the left is getting prett y small. i haven't tweaked FF yet, so i'll reserve judgement...LOVE the logo, btw. LOVE it. and thunderbird. gorgeous.
 
sinisterdesign said:
...
i think my biggest complaint w/ FF so far is that the interface is really UGLY.
...
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If I were looking at Safari and Firefox interfaces design-wise, I certainly would pick Firefox as a better interface.

However, these are browsers and what I want to see is websites shown correctly and for the majority of what I view, Firefox is better.
 
bousozoku said:
If I were looking at Safari and Firefox interfaces design-wise, I certainly would pick Firefox as a better interface.

However, these are browsers and what I want to see is websites shown correctly and for the majority of what I view, Firefox is better.
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now that i think about it, my safari has a theme on it, too (just a nice looking one). i've looked at this theme so long i can't picture the default safari interface.

looking fwd to getting to know FF, though! if it takes a chunk out of IE, i'll be happy...
 
fossicker said:
1) Firefox will warn you if you close a window with multiple tabs open. You can override this behavior if you don't like it, but I want it. Every once in a while I hit command-q instead of command-w, and there's no warning, no way to recover. POOF! everything goes away.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I do this periodically too.... :(

If Apple set up some kinda structure for people to do plugins at the mad rate that Firefox has them, I wonder if there'd be some more interesting stuff out there. But then I guess it'd be hard for Apple to control the Safari experience then...
 
mkrishnan said:
Yeah, I do this periodically too.... :(

If Apple set up some kinda structure for people to do plugins at the mad rate that Firefox has them, I wonder if there'd be some more interesting stuff out there. But then I guess it'd be hard for Apple to control the Safari experience then...
Click to expand...

SAFT cured this problem for me.
 
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