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Best Mac Browser?

Firefox

My vote goes to Firefox for two reasons:

1. Double click the tab bar to open a new tab (yeah, petty but I like it)
2. The two finger drag on my new PB works for scrolling up and down but in Firefox dragging your fingers left or right enables you to flick backwards and forwards through previously viewed web pages. Sure you have to be careful not to flick too far but I find this invaluable

Lookswise, no difference as far as I can tell. As for speed, I think Firefox has the edge and ditto for compatibility.

Just my two cents!
 
Camino is definitely the best and fastest browser (especially the optimized builds), especially now that the most persistant bugs are being ironed out. Seriously, give it a try. No other browser seems up to snuff to me anymore.
 
To the pretentious anti-fullscreeners...The human brain processes information in a wide field of vision. Take a second and consider it...your perspective is wider than it is tall, due to the fact that you have two eyes, both of which have the same up and down capability placed on a level plane (more or less). Therefore, your perspective is limited in straight up and down to what one eye can process given one "frame" of vision (unless your cock eyed, of course). However, having two eyes side by side gives you roughly double the width of vision.

Having a wide screen and viewing documents full screen is, at the minimum, easier on the eyes. However, some would argue you actually retain information better when its presented in the natural wide aspect. In the most mundane sense of things, widescreen helps me read long posts on threads without having to scroll down.

This, butt monkeys, is why I prefer widescreen to windowed viewing.
 
$MacUser$ said:
pretentious butt monkeys
Click to expand...
After well over 100 years of development, newspapers have narrow columns. It's easier to read narrow columns than wide columns.

Wide or full screen layouts are better for pictures, movies and applications with multiple palettes and windows. Narrow columns are better for text.

To each his/her own, but the vast majority is more comfortable reading text in narrow columns.
 
magazines and newspapers write in narrow columns because they are trying to fit the most information in a preformated amount of space...it has nothing to do with ease of reading...i find newspapers rather tedious, actually, which is why i just view the online version widescreen.

I was just kidding about the whole pretentious butt monkeys thing..just trying to get a chuckle, not trying to be offensive.
 
$MacUser$ said:
magazines and newspapers write in narrow columns because they are trying to fit the most information in a preformated amount of space...it has nothing to do with ease of reading...i find newspapers rather tedious, actually, which is why i just view the online version widescreen.
Click to expand...
Newspaper layout has been researched and studied for decades. How they are laid out has everything to do with ease of reading. You are conditioned to prefer reading your news online. Here's a study of the phenomenon: http://www.poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/main.htm
 
Safari is my favorite.
Everyonce in a while it locks up badly, so I switch to Camino for a while. I don't dislike Camino, but I do preffer Safari for its UI simplicity and (when it isn't locked up) speed.
 
I've been using safari for the last few hours with my new iBook. So far I really enjoy it. I think this one and firefox are my favorite, though i've yet to try firefox on a mac.

I love my iBook though, whoo! :)

Jack
 
I used to use Camino, but then I went back to Safari - until last night. I work on Quicktime movies a lot for my website and when I preview a movie in Safari it is next to impossible to get it to forget what it just saw. Let me explain. I find an issue with the first movie so I replace it with a revised version. Safari continues to play the old one. Even after resetting everything, clearing the cache and history and everything else I could think of. This isn't the first time this has happened... I even shut the Power Mac off, turned it back on and it played the old version :eek:

Popped over to Camino and it played the new version. Go figure. Back to Camino for me. I can't be waisting time messing with software that doesn't do what it's supposed to. Mabye back in the Windows days that would have been acceptable, but OS X has raised the standard :cool:
 
Cooknn said:
I used to use Camino, but then I went back to Safari - until last night. I work on Quicktime movies a lot for my website and when I preview a movie in Safari it is next to impossible to get it to forget what it just saw. Let me explain. I find an issue with the first movie so I replace it with a revised version. Safari continues to play the old one. Even after resetting everything, clearing the cache and history and everything else I could think of. This isn't the first time this has happened... I even shut the Power Mac off, turned it back on and it played the old version :eek:

Popped over to Camino and it played the new version. Go figure. Back to Camino for me. I can't be waisting time messing with software that doesn't do what it's supposed to. Mabye back in the Windows days that would have been acceptable, but OS X has raised the standard :cool:
Click to expand...

And while we're on the Camino subject, the developers just wrote pause/resume support for downloads. :cool:
 
$MacUser$ said:
To the pretentious anti-fullscreeners...The human brain processes information in a wide field of vision. Take a second and consider it...your perspective is wider than it is tall, due to the fact that you have two eyes, both of which have the same up and down capability placed on a level plane (more or less). Therefore, your perspective is limited in straight up and down to what one eye can process given one "frame" of vision (unless your cock eyed, of course). However, having two eyes side by side gives you roughly double the width of vision.
Click to expand...

With an easy experiment, you can determine that adding a second eye adds only about 50% to your width of vision, not another 100%. Cover your left eye and adjust your head so that some fixed object is at the leftmost edge of the field of view of your right eye. Without moving your head, uncover your left eye and see how much additional field of view you gain. Not that much, thanks to the fact that both of your eyes face roughly forward. If you were a creature whose eyes were located more on the sides of the head (birds?), you might get closer to 100% wider field of view using both eyes. In that circumstance, you might find yourself preferring two monitors rather than one.


Crikey
 
It is a preliminary study of several dozen people conducted in San Francisco. It is not an exhaustive exploration that we can extrapolate to the larger population. It is a mix of "findings" based on controlled variables, and "observations" where testing was not as tightly controlled. The researchers went "wide," not "deep" -- covering a lot of ground in terms of website design and multimedia factors.
Click to expand...

This was an informal study, after all. Also, there is no mention of print newspapers that I saw, except a small blub in regards to their images being somehow poorly executed.

In all, I'd rather trust psycological journals than questionable web sources. In the end, the way you view your web pages is extremely subjective. What works for me may or may not work for you. The human mind is not a generality, thus should not be treated as such.
 
$MacUser$ said:
This was an informal study, after all. Also, there is no mention of print newspapers that I saw, except a small blub in regards to their images being somehow poorly executed.

In all, I'd rather trust psycological journals than questionable web sources.
Click to expand...
The Poynter Institute has a great reputation. It's hardly a "questionable web source."

Anyway, there have been extensive academic studies done about newspaper page layout, and although they aren't indexed in Google they are cited in my university journalism textbooks.

Print newspapers are mentioned several times on the page I linked. The portion that's relevant to what I brought up is this:
www.poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/main.htm said:
Most news website article pages present stories in a single column of text, but a handful of sites -- like IHT.com and TheHerald.co.uk -- mimic newspaper layout and present articles in two or three side-by-side columns. Is this as readable as the traditional (for the Web) one-column article format?

Eyetrack III results showed that the standard one-column format performed better in terms of number of eye fixations -- in other words, people viewed more. However, bear in mind that habit may have affected this outcome. Since most people are accustomed to one-column Web articles, the surprise of seeing three-column type might have affected their eye behavior.
Click to expand...
That's what I meant when I said you've been conditioned to expect a certain type of layout on news websites.

There are design and layout ideas which are close enough to universal to be considered principles. Newspapers are far enough along in their development to have discovered and refined them. The Web is still in the process, but it's much further along than it was only five years ago.

$MacUser$ said:
What works for me may or may not work for you. The human mind is not a generality, thus should not be treated as such.
Click to expand...
I said that yesterday. I'm glad you agree.
 
First of all you won't get far in a discussion by calling other people butt monkeys. Second of all, how are your eyes utilised more efficiently by looking at a wide white open space? Isn't it better utilised by being available for the desktop or other windows so that you can drag things that you want to download there or watch your online IM friends or something.

I agree that on display that are 1024x768 it is usually better with full screen, and in those cases the green button will usually do a full screen since it fits the window to its content.
 
unfortunately, I find that I cant use just one browser because there are too many problems with web sites and browser incompatiblity.

For example, this last week; at American Airlines' web site I used Firefox because IE is just way too slow on that site and Safari doesn't work with some of the ticket purchasing features.....but I had to use IE to check a friend's work schedule for him because neither Firefox or Safari would work with his company's site. Also this last week, I was applying for a visa for travel to Brazil and NONE of the Mac browsers were sufficiently compatible with the online application for me to be able to completely fill out the form. I had to go to Kinkos to rent an hour on a Windows PC, then everthing worked fine. Also last week I discovered that one of my banks has a web site that says it's only compatible with Windows bowswers.....haven't discovered the problem yet but I'm sure I'll find out in time, but in the meantime Safari seems to be working fine on that site but not IE.

so it's a mish-mash........I don't think there's a "Best" browser since they all have problems
 
Raw speed? Lynx is the way to go
If you want pictures? I'd say Safari. With a few mods, it screams along, and it has all the nice little extras.
 
My vote goes to Shiira despite the fact that Tab Expose and the page turning effect are slow and therefore impractical.

Things I like about Shiira:
1) File menu includes "Print Page As a PDF." Very practical.
2) Easily imports bookmarks from Safari, Firefox, or both.
3) One click full-screen mode (rarely needed, but nice for some sites).
4) Fish icon :rolleyes:

Things I wish Shiira had:
1) RSS handling like Safari.
2) File menu "Mail" options like Safari 2.
 
I have and use both Safari and FF.

Safari (2.0) is my browser of choice. It's as fast or faster than FF for page rendering; simple, clean interface and terrific RSS integration. It's also a cocoa based app, which means all the OS X specific goodies (integrated spell-checker, dictionary look-up, spotlight hard drive searches from highlighted browser text, text summary, and so on) come along for the ride. It's handling of javascript quirks on some web pages isn't quite there yet, although it improved significantly with 2.0. One of the reasons I still keep FF handy.

FF scores points for general rendering speed and extensibility/customization. I use it when I know I want to "lock down" what some web pages do, using FF's extensions (adblock, Flashblock, Noscript and so on), and also for any sites I run across that Safari has compatibility issues with, which isn't much these days.

Other than that, the Mac version of FF seems like it's been on snooze control for awhile now, not much in the way of improvements/fixes. Still takes a long time (relatively) to launch. The default interface is butt-ugly for a Mac OS X program, but that's curable with various themes that are out there. The bookmark search is a guaranteed crash. The contextual menu will sometimes loose screen orientation and flow upwards when it should flow downwards with otherwise available menu choices disappearing off the top of the screen. And what's with the Window's XP screenshots - in a Mac help screen?

All in all, FF still feels like a beta program to me. Too many interface, behavior quirks and bugs abound, and that, in my book, prevents it from being a serious contender for the default, full-time browser award on OS X. But it's a great back-up for Safari, and the extensions are great. I just hope one of these days the Mozilla folks will do a top to bottom revision of FF on the Mac, and hopefully start that revision with making it a cocoa app instead of carbon.

As far as IE on the Mac, forget it. Too slow, no longer developed or supported and some of it's features (like search) are dying. Between, Safari and FF, all of the bases are covered.
 
I use Safari most of the time (I'm a sucker for 1st party products - I'll use them even if they're the worst on the market ... ....... ) but like VanNess I have FireFox because there are some web-based applications that just don't seem to run properly in Safari. Mostly games :p
 
Safari is addicting, I love how it remembers all the input I do with autofill and it asks me if I want to save a password when I log into something. It is fast as heak too. :)
 
Fast and good browser = OPERA

If you like a fast and stable browser you should take a look at Opera (www.opera.com) - Opera is much faster than Safari and is loaded with features that makes your browsing much more enjoyable.
 
I ran Safari then it kept giving me problems so I ran camino. I run safari now almost all of the time. to pay my electric bill i need internet explorer, but that is pretty much the only time I use IE.
 
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