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I've gone full circle on Browsers. Back to Safari

UKnjb said:
FWIW, I found Safari OK, but everyone was saying that Firefox and Camino were so much better/faster. So I tried both of them. Yup, certainly I found them faster, but more 'clunky' than Safari. And then someone else was raving about Shiira, so I tried that (about 7 months ago) and it has been the best of the bunch, IMHO.

So I have stuck with that. It's been ---- great. Fast, streamlined, sleek uncluttered interface. Never bombed on a site yet.
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I second that, also Shiira is by far and away the most beautiful browser out there with fantastic Japanese minimalist design and great choice of elegant colours in the toolbar.

Safari's metal look is dated, Firefox is clunky, Camino is close but no cigar and as for the "relic" Internet Explorer 5.2 - no comment.
 
when I first got my mac I was using Firefox just because it's what I used (and still do) on PC's. But after having it choke to death on enough flash sites I finally gave Safari and go and I've been using it ever since. I do use Firefox for web development though.
 
i have switched back and forth since i got my first mac years ago with the Mac OS X Jaguar... those were good times :) hehe Back then Safari was still a little baby and I HAD to use IE:mac... no comment. then, guess where I read about Safari! Playboy magazine! amazing, yes, and so was Safari. Then still on Jaguar I tried out Firefox, since it was the innovative browser, it had adblock and all that, then, I wanted something less "heavyweight" and more mac-like so I went to camino. Then back to safari after so many updates etc because I love running Apple software... it just feels so integrated! Then I got panther for a couple months and I think I used Safari because there was this big change or something, then shortly after that I got Tiger and used Safari still. Then Opera. The Shiiira. The iCab. Then Flock. Then Firefox which I had really destroyed with horrible skins and plug-ins. Then Camino which was and still is really nice (it still has an important use). Then a month ago or so back to Safari, because I know how to block the ads now! I use camino's adblock for that. Go to Safari>Preferences>Advanced>StyleSheet...:>Users>~>Library>Appplication Support>Camino>chrome>ad_blocking.css ¡¡Voilá!!
 
Safari owns the rest of the browsers in speed, features, and ease of use.
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that just is not true. camino, firefox and shiira are all faster than safari. safari also has a jacked up bookmark feature, when i click on bookmarks i want to see a pull down list not a whole another page show up. i also want to be able to just click on the tabbar and open a tab not have to apple/t to open one. these are simple basic features that safari should have and doesnt. it is a memory hog and sluggish. i want to like it because it has a built in rss reader but thats its only redeeming quality.
 
it depends on your mac, safari has a smaller ram footprint for me than firefox so is faster on my ibook, but firefox is faster on my cube with 1.5GB ram.
 
Internet Explorer all the way on my mac. It's the better way to internet with its customizable colors. It's so fast. wow. Im definitely just kidding. I love safari all the way.
 
I have been using Safari, FF and Camino, but I'm sticking with Shiira. Looks better and is as fast as Safari. Opera was completely disappointing, the layout and all.

One thing I haven't figured out yet: how do I make shiira the default browser for everything? Some applications keep opening safari.
 
Apple said:
Internet Explorer all the way on my mac. It's the better way to internet with its customizable colors. It's so fast.
Click to expand...

Scared me for a minute there.

Although... IE 5 is sadly still my browser recommendation for Mac OS 7.6.
 
ppnkg said:
I have been using Safari, FF and Camino, but I'm sticking with Shiira. Looks better and is as fast as Safari. Opera was completely disappointing, the layout and all.

One thing I haven't figured out yet: how do I make shiira the default browser for everything? Some applications keep opening safari.
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Wacky, but you have to set this from within Safari!
Safari > Preferences > Default Browser ---- and set it to Shiira. :)
 
zami said:
Safari's metal look is dated
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Try downloading UNO 1.3 . You can remove the brushed metal look from most Aqua menus, and choose either a light (iTunes-like) or dark (iPhoto-like) smooth interface. I like the dark one, personally. Anyways, give it a try.
 
I came from the Windows world and was a die hard Firefox fan, but when I got my MBP, I felt it didn't give me what I needed from my browser. I tried Camino, but it is still very slow IMO. And I am sure there are some unhandled memory leaks, it's impossible how stuck it gets at times. It can eat my RAM real quick. So for the time being, despite it being limited for some sites, I am using safari.

Last night I tried Shiira and liked it very much (it's also based on webkit so it has all the safari goodies). The "open selection in tabs", tab expose', download manager and page transitions are really nice add-ons. Plus the shiira widget comes in handy what you want something checked out real quick.

Oded S.
 
I was using Firefox for the SessionSaver plug-in but decided to spring for Saft and I'm back on Safari. I love that I can save all tabs as bookmarks and restore all tabs when I relaunch Safari after a quit or a crash. I don't use the other features much, but those two features are a lifesaver for me and make Safari usable.
 
Coming in a bit late here I guess, but I have always used Safari. I've never seen FF in action, dabbled with Opera a few years back.
 
UKnjb said:
FWIW, I found Safari OK, but everyone was saying that Firefox and Camino were so much better/faster. So I tried both of them. Yup, certainly I found them faster, but more 'clunky' than Safari. And then someone else was raving about Shiira, so I tried that (about 7 months ago) and it has been the best of the bunch, IMHO.

So I have stuck with that. It's been ---- great. Fast, streamlined, sleek uncluttered interface. Never bombed on a site yet.
Click to expand...

Sorry for quoting myself, but I am a confirmed Shiira user. However, this afternoon I needed to use IE and while it was running, went to my standard e-mail provider (a UK-based system). It seemed to take forever, so I ran a comparison with the various Browsers.

The exercise involved getting the browser to go to the home page of the organisation, logging in and then clicking on the button to go to my e-mail. And timing was done with my sweep-hand wrist watch, so a tadsworth of inaccuracy there. :(

Results:
Shiira: 6 secs
Safari: 6 secs
Camino: 8 secs
Firefox: 8 secs
IE: 135 secs !!!!!!!

With IE, the logging in to the home page took 80 seconds and then the direction to my mail box took the other 55 seconds. There was a spinning black/white whatsit while IE did whatever it did.

All caches of the various browsers had been cleared.

As far as these numbers go, there is no difference between any of the popular browsers covered in this thread (except I prefer Shiira for its simplicity) but I do not understand why IE should be so slow.

Any ideas, comments? :)
 
UKnjb said:
Any ideas, comments? :)
Click to expand...
I guess I'll comment on the obvious. IE hasn't been updated for nearly 3 years (maybe longer) on the Mac. So go figure.
Safari is still doing a fine job for me and I don't miss Camino.
 
I feel lost when I don't have Opera to surf the web with. Though I remember it wasn't as good in OS X as in Windows/Linux. I still used it though, since no other browser is as easily customizable (menus/keyboard shortcuts/whatever). Firefox is probably very customizable, if you know XUL, which I don't. So it falls on the easy part.
 
Safari>FF>Camino>Opera>Shiira.

I like Opera because I can save sessions and it has the little "trash" button so I can recover sites that I may have accidentally closed. I use Shiira because it's fast and looks good.
 
Alright I'm back to Camino now. Safari takes A LOT! of memory. Was running my system into the ground.

Will I ever make up my mind? Probably... when I have a computer with more 1gb of RAM.
 
GimmeSlack12 said:
Houston we have a problem.

Safari doesn't do Video Google or YouTube!!!???!?!?! WTF? Flip4Mac is installed and works fine for CNN.com on my other browsers, but Safari is not doing anything about it. What is going on?!
Please tell me I'm doing something wrong cause this is unnacceptable.
Click to expand...

I had that problem to .. then i opened the safari prefs and saw the chechbox beside the text enable plugins, was not active. so i activated plugins then everything worked

EDIT: oh you found out ... my bad
 
Safari > IE > Firefox > Omniweb > Camino > Shiira > Safari

Camino is a great browser, but for one reason or another I stopped using it. Probably something to do with not supporting my online banking.

Shiira too looked very promising (I love the novelty of the page transition effects) until I realised it won't let me log in to my University webmail. Takes the username and password and tells me they're wrong. They are not wrong.

But Safari is such a good browser that there isn't all that much difference between them. It does what I need it to do (would be nice if ad-blocking was an Apple feature though).
 
Firefox > Safari > Safari/Firefox

Lately I started using Firefox again for 2 reasons:

-Double-clicking the blank space of the tab bar opens a new tab
-Extensions (specifically DownThemAll & Adblock)

I hadn't heard of Shiira until reading this thread, but I'm gonna give it a try when I get home.
 
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