Best browser?

I stick with Safari but browser choice is quite a personal decision. The good news is you can have them all and decide for yourself.

 

I like Safari the best. You'll get a lot of different opinions, just try them out and see. I also keep Firefox on my Dock in case a site isn't looking exactly right in Safari.

 

I'm a Safari person as well. It seems to do everyting I need and looks better than Firefox IMO. My next option is usually Camino.

 

I've went from Firefox to Safari a year ago and back to Firefox about 6 months ago (actually Bon Echo aka Firefox 2.0 alpha 3 for the last couple of days).

I prefer Firefox over Safari because Firefox has a much better system for add-ons/extensions, and also because Safari (or more accurately webkit) has a bug that makes it crash like h*** on one of the website I use most often, and there's a few other smaller issues that for the most part points to Firefox.

 

I'm a firefox person. Safari just wasn't working for me. Firefox owns all to me. But again, it's personal. Try them out, see what you like best.

 

I personally like firefox, but for really tiny reasons... First, when you have a million tabs open, the little icon you click to close is permanently on the right, rather than on each individual tab, so you can just keep clicking instead of moving the mouse every time a tab closes. Second, on the bookmarks toolbar, I like the way that groups work better than in safari.

Another good browser is Shiira, so you could try it out too...

 

I find Safari to be the best browser I have ever used. I tried to get used to Firefox and Camino, but I just seem to prefer Safari for some reason.

 

Well, enjoy it while it lasts, because it seems this is changed with 2.0 (a shame really, because I too liked having just one close button):

 

That's quite frankly depressing

 

I like Camino. It's a bit nicer looking than Firefox. And I always experience a slow-down w/ Safari. Ick. My main gripe w/ Camino-- doesn't yet support Mac OS X's pop-up dictionary and spellcheck.

But it's quick, clean, and still pleasant to look at and use.

 

I've been using OmniWeb for years (since version 2)... just can't live without the features anymore.

 

I prefer safari for those reasons:

1)Ever tried to select a text in firefox and not let the left mouse button go? My g5 fans are winding up, making my computer sound like an airplane. That's bad memory management. Safari doesn't do this.
2)Fast startup times. In 2 secongs on my g5, safari is already loading the homepage. Firefox takes about 7 seconds to startup. That makes it suitable for opening local html documents for viewing.
3)There are pages that look better in safari than firefox
4)Safari window resizing is much faster. That falls into the memory management and programming rules interface.
5)Consistency in the GUI, elegant and small buttons, very few options but works good... And also the thing that I like over firefox is the 'close' sign next to each tab. Firefox does not have this (forcing me to do a right-click->close tab) and the middle button of my mouse that closes the tab doesn't work in firefox for some reason
6)In some pages, it's faster than firefox.

 

There isn't a best browser. I keep most of them handy so I don't have to do without something.

Firefox fits most everything, and Shiira or Safari, handles the rest. Camino and Opera are good browsers but just don't have much use with the others available.

 

Bousozoku hit it on the head. You need to try out the browsers for yourself. But obviously if you are looking for something comparable to Firefox on windows then definitely download Firefox for X.
Personally I use Safari as my primary and Firefox as a secondary. I've used Shiira and hated it.

 

I use firefox on all my machines. Mac, Windows, Linux... I love being able to use the same browser no matter which OS I am working with!

 

Welcome to MR

Have a good look at Shiira, a free Cocoa-written, Web Kit based browser that I have been been using for some time. It is fast, clean-looking, reliable and does all that I want a browser to do. Good luck with your choice!

 

I got my first mac(book) recently. I gave Safari a short go, but I wasn't really interested in configuring it the way I want to browse (finding out how to get tabs and so on), because I think there are two good reasons not to use it no matter how good it is relative to the others.

What I'm saying is, you shouldn't even give it a fair chance.

1. In usage polls, Safari is almost as common on OS X as Explorer is on Windows.

If someone wants to insert malicious code on web sites that targets Mac users, they'll be expecting Safari. Everybody has it installed and more people are using it than the other browsers combined. (I don't remember where I saw the statistics, sorry.) While there aren't any serious viruses for OS X that I know of, exploits are discovered regularly just like for every other OS and browser. Lately, it seems all the exploits I've heard about have been for rendering objects like image files with Apple's Web Kit, which Safari uses. One set of exploits allowed to run any code on your computer by embedding it in a JPEG. Avoiding Web Kit also means not using the other browsers based on it, Shiira and the rest.

2. You've got Safari only when using a Mac.

I don't know about the majority of Mac users, but I'd bet that a lot of you also have PC(s) or use them at work. Whether Windows, Linux or some other OS, you won't have Safari available. So getting too used to it might not be a good idea. Exporting your settings won't be too easy and you might have no idea how to accomplish something you're used to doing. I even use mostly web mail instead of mail clients because I don't want to depend on any specific computer, so your habits may vary.

So, what should you use then? My Firefox experience has been quite free of troubles, so I can recommend that. The extension paradigm means that a new install takes a little more time to get going than something like Opera, and using Firefox on a friend's computer might simply mean you can't do things the way you like to because of a different set of extensions. I was using Opera before Firefox and I'll be trying it again once Opera 9 comes out.

Firefox has been good for me, but I'm going to check Opera out because of mouse gestures (must have extension for Firefox, for me) being better integrated into the browser there. If I recall correctly. In Firefox, the browser can be unresponsive to my gestures when the tab I'm on hasn't loaded yet, and some similar situations. Opera also has a smaller memory footprint, it's consistently fast across different platforms (I've read that Firefox is slow on OS X compared to other systems, although I haven't really noticed much.) and a default installation of Opera has almost everything I want. (The rest doesn't count as bloat to me when the whole browser is still so small and fast. ) Things to make me want to stick with Firefox are all the existing gazillion extensions (I can find some really obscure stuff that only a small minority that I belong to would find useful.) and better (known) market share: you'll find more web designers remembering to check their site with Firefox than with Opera.

Oops, kinda long post again... Oh well, I hope you make up your mind and try stuff out, and hopefully even end up with a non-Safari browser!

 

Whoa i just messed around with Shiira and wow im impressed very cool browser! Ive still got Firefox running most of the time, but this could very well take it over.

 

Sweet. That might actually get me to switch to Firefox.

Nah. Safari is where it's at!

 

Its all about opinion personally I don't like Firefox but I can see why people use it (extensions) which I never use......

I have tried to love Safari but there's always something it does which gets on my nerves and always end up reverting to my beloved Camino.....

ShadoW

 

Been a Safari guy for ages - IE for Mac before that.

Noticed that Safari freezes a lot on some webpages, won't load up my Router settings, and Orange and Halifax aren't to keen on it, either.

Been trying out Camino and I LOVE IT.. only thing i hate about it is that once you select to open the link in a new tab, it makes the tab you just requested to open, the current one. ie: on eBay (via Safari) I open LOADS of diff. auctions in diff. tabs, then view them when I want, with Camino once you choose to open the new tab, it brings it to the forefront, so you jump off the page you were currently viewing and onto that one. You then have to revert to the previous tab. Its kinda hard to explain and its 9am here *yawn*

Firefox is also good,but it doesn't have a button on each tab to close it - you have to right/CTRL click, then select close tab ... and its pretty ugly, and I don't care for the themes much, either.

As a new Mac user, Safari is the best, works good with no tweaking.

 

regardless of which one you use, just remember:

ALL your browsers are belong to us.

So just use whichever one you like.

We wont tell anyone....

(except for those guys in the extremely black suits with black glasses, and cars, and guns!)

 

If you want a close button on each tab download the extension tab mix plus. It not only adds the close button but its also a session saver and tons of other features. I stick with FF pretty much for this extension, i usually have about 20 tabs open at a time and if somethign crashes its one click to get all my tabs back. Also if you accidently close a tab you can right click and open up to the 5 most recently closed tabs.