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Firefox or Safari ? ? ?

jimleszczynski

jimleszczynski

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jan 19, 2008
135
0
Mount Pleasant, MI
Ok. So both firefox and safari have their benefits. Personally I enjoy using Safari more.

My question to you is... (not including any additional add-ons for firefox...)

Which web browser should you or do you recommend using and why. I want to know simply if the major advantages to one or the other. Security flaws, speed, performance, etc.
 
You will get faster results if you search the forums for the topic before starting a new thread. This subject has been discussed dozens of times in the forums, so you'll probably find all you need to know without repeating everything again.

You can use Google to search the forums here.
 
ggjstudios said:
You will get faster results if you search the forums for the topic before starting a new thread. This subject has been discussed dozens of times in the forums, so you'll probably find all you need to know without repeating everything again.
Click to expand...

Wow. I searched the forums in dozens of separate criteria and could not find anything. Do you have a link?
 
Forum searches don't always work, People need to learn how to put key words in their titles.

As for the OP

I like Firefox best. I also use Safari for downloading youtube videos for ipod every once in a while, but Regular day-to-day browsing, I enjoy firefox.


The main reason why is because I often use the "Bookmarks Toolbar"

I have folders in it for "Resources" "Sites" and other stuff. When I click one menu, I have a list of bookmarks in that folder. When I move the mouse over, the next one automatically opens for me, displaying the bookmarks in that folder.

Safari just opens one menu, and makes me click the other ones in order to open them. I know that doesn't sound like a huge issue, but it bothers me. It's like being forced to use the mouse to manually click "search" rather than simply hitting Enter/Return.
 
i.shaun said:
Forum searches don't always work, People need to learn how to put key words in their titles.
Click to expand...

I agree that using the "Search Forums" method doesn't always get the desired results. However, if you use Google search via the link I provided, it doesn't matter what key words they put in the titles. Google searches the entire text of the threads for the words you're searching for. It's extremely effective.

By the way, I agree the function of the Firefox boomarks toolbar is better than Safari. For now, I'm giving up that convenience in exchange for MUCH faster surfing that Safari provides. I also miss some of the Firefox add-ons, but the speed of Safari is refreshing!
 
I love Flock. It's Firefox socialized. Safari is OK, but I don't think it is as fast as Flock/Firefox. It also seems to have more bugs.
 
ggjstudios said:
If you're comparing speed between Safari and Firefox, here's some interesting reading.
Click to expand...

i have a hard time believe those numbers. everbody else's test shows firefox has faster javascript speed. and lower memory management, and this test would be so different?

Not to mention those memory consumption numbers are quite suspecious. Did anyone with 4GB RAM see their browsers (whichever) consume less than 60MB after 1 hour usage?

to OP, try each one for yourself.

attached is my ~2 hrs test of memory usage, on leopard
websites are protopage, yahoo, rottentomatoes, cbsnews, cnn, news.com, palminfocenter, msnbc, wimbledon, digg, macrumors, nytimes, at the end of test, there were 6 tabs open. When I closed 5 of them, Firefox was using 125MB, and Safari was using 225MB.
 

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clevin said:
i have a hard time believe those numbers...
Click to expand...

My personal experience with Firefox over the past 3-4 years compared with Safari echoes the results of that test. Safari is noticeably faster in bringing up web pages, with or without heavy graphics or flash. As an example, I would do a search on eBay and then, on the search results page, Command-click several items, opening each in a new tab. Each tab would have 10-20 pictures of the item. With Firefox, more than half of the images would never open, forcing me to refresh each tab several times to finally get all the images. With Safari, I could Command-Click dozens of the same links and all images would load on every tab in less time than Firefox would load 4 or 5 tabs. Of course, your mileage may vary, but in my experience, Safari runs circles around Firefox on speed.

Where Safari falls short is in several areas, such as:

  1. Can't right-click on a bookmark to edit the name or location.
  2. Can't store properties for a bookmark, which I used in Firefox to store passwords on sites that Keychain won't store them for.
  3. Can't sort bookmarks.
  4. Can't use unique icons for bookmarks, which makes them easier to find.
  5. The lack of useful add-ons, such as Research Word for FF, which enables you to right-click on a word or name on a website and having a menu pop up, allowing me to search for that term on Wikipedia, flickr, IMDb, YouTube, or any other user-defined site.
  6. Can't right-click on some annoying Flash item and block the item and its frame, leaving the rest of the page intact.
  7. Now I'm missing the single-window mode, which forces all new windows to open a new tab instead. Too many sites use Java to open new windows when you click a link. It's so annoying not to have those automatically open new tabs!

These are just a few of Safari's limitations. For now, I'll enjoy the speed while I fully explore all of Safari's features, but I may end up going back to Firefox for the add-ons.
 
ggjstudios said:
My personal experience with Firefox over the past 3-4 years compared with Safari echoes the results of that test.
Click to expand...

the problem is, however, firefox 3 and firefox 2 are two VERY different beasts. You really should try out.
 
clevin said:
the problem is, however, firefox 3 and firefox 2 are two VERY different beasts. You really should try out.
Click to expand...

I probably will try it in the next month or two, after I've fully explored all the functionality of Safari.
 
I never really noticed a speed difference on my machine, or maybe I just don't care to wait 2 seconds rather than 1 or less.

If safari had Firefox's bookmark functionality, organization, and a cooler theme - I would use it full time.


or on the other hand, If firefox had an activity window like Safari, I would use that full time.


The former would seem easier to pull off.
 
Safari Or Firefox???????

Well in my opinion Safari is a bit faster than than firefox and easy to handle.It browses faster than Firefox but in Firefox the downloading speed is faster as compared to Safari. Safari was indroduced by Apple.It takes much more space as compared to Firefox in the hard disk but is worth its space.With Safari the computer becomes a bit slow in processing but still I would give an extra point to safari just because it browses a bit faster.........

aakash.......
OUTSOURCING
 
Personally Safari, the keychain integration is what keeps me from Firefox.

For bookmarks, I use del.icio.us so I can pull any of my bookmarks from any browser. The javascript's that del.icio.us has, are what I use to see and add them.

One thing that will speed up any browser, is ad removal. I tried some 3rd party ones in FF like ad block, and tried to use saft's blocking, but I was always adding them, or having to right click add url or image.

I found http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ and wrote a little shell script that replaces my host file with it. then does a diff on the old one and new one so I can see what was added. It works great, and does not block anything I do not want it to block. And because it points it to localhost, your not waiting for some ad server in some other country to time out. I went one step further and turned on apache on my MBP, and had it output a blank 404.html page. Works great!
 
Yeah having Firefox 3 and Safari 3 for a quite a while now, it certainly seems Safari is a bit faster. It opens up faster than Firefox and I absolutely hate Firefox's scroll. The smooth scroll option from the preferences and the addon is horrendous to use as well. But Firefox is a decent alternative, actually, it is a VERY nice alternative to using Safari.

One thing though that I know for a fact that Firefox does better than Safari is memory management. I had 8 tabs loaded onto Safari and after about 5 minutes, Safari was using 404 MB of memory.

I did the same thing with Firefox the next day. I even had 9 tabs open on Firefox and it was using 182 MB of memory. Very nice.
 
I think the best thing about choosing a browser is that all of the downloads are free. Download them all, try them all out, and eventually you'll find the one that suits you best. I keep going between Safari, Firefox and Camino. They all have their good and bad points. Currently Firefox 3 is my browser of choice, but if I find something new, I'll simply switch.
 
Safari in OS X and Firefox in Windows.

Windows has a crappy bundled web browser so its obvious to use Firefox in Windows. but OS X bundles a great lightweight, fast browser albeit doesnt have extensions (i only use Saft and Safari Block anyway) so why use Firefox?

i only have Firefox installed to browse sites than dont follow web standards and so dont work in Safari.
 
richthomas said:
so why use Firefox?
Click to expand...

check my sig for 50% of the answers to this question.

The other half is extensions/addons, you may use only two, but others might want to use more, after all, there are 4000+ of them, can't make judgment before you even know or try them, right?:)

PS. safari isn't exactly "light weigh" anymore, if it ever was. it is bigger in size, and consumes much more memory as well.
 
ggjstudios said:
You can use Google to search the forums here.
Click to expand...

Hmm... what's the point in having a site devoted to doing a google search on macrumors when you can just use google itself?

Just search for:
"site:forums.macrumors.com KEYWORDS"

As for browsers - without any addons (which is what the OP specified) I'd have to say Safari. Quicker, and better OS integration.
One major gripe I have with Safari is the way it handles bookmarks. There's no bookmarks toolbar, instead you have to open a new tab / window.

With addons Firefox is the best. It give you so much flexibility :D
 
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