Will you give Safari another chance with Tiger?

[x86isslow]

firefox's platinum like theme didn't do well in panther, but fits in remarkably in tiger. i find it easier to look at than safari. i gave safariRSS a whirl, but i must say i still hate the program. i'll stick with firefox's RSS implementation. as for speed, i'm on a college network, so even internet exploder seems fast.

 

[iGary]

I never gave up on Safari.

I tried Firefox, and personally didn't see much of a diff, so I stuck with Safari.

I constantly have to smack coworkers in the back of the head when I catch them using IE on their Macs at work.

 

[Bear]

I haven't used Safari much. I'll look at it again.

However, there are 3 things I think I would need to be able to switch to Safari:

1. A white list for the pop up blocker, I don't want to have to remember to switch it every tme I go to a site that I need to see the popups.
2. An extension like adblock for Mozilla/Firefox.
3. the Mozilla/Firefox flashblock extension (not as crtitcal, might switch if the first two needs were met)

I'll admit that I haven't looked to see what extensions are available for Safari, is there a website that maintains a list of them?

[There might be other things but might not realize them until I use Safari for a bit.]

 

[840quadra]

oddly I use both,

I find Safari great for the text based surfing and reading of news sites and such. I use firefox for more of the multimedia sites. I find it handy to have separate favorites, between the two browsers as well.

I do like the interface in firefox a bit better though, and the fact that I can use it on my Dell in both XP and Fedora Core, and also use it on my Macintosh computers.

 

[sebisworld]

I have always used Safari because Tiger was always "Just around the corner". Firefox would have been the better choice, it's just a lot better when you surf with a lot of tabs open and it also allows to view pages that are cached when you are offline. I've never made the switch though because I believe that Safari 2 will pay me back for being consistent. Of course, I'm still hoping for that noble peace price to go along with that decision.

 

[~Shard~]

I've never deserted Safari either, it works fine for me and I have never had any issues with it. If Safari 2 in Tiger is going to be even more improved over the existing version, then that gives me all the more reason to continue using it.

 

[jim.]

In terms of sheer (perceived?) speed, I don't think anything can really touch Camino right now. I tried Safari 1.3 and it still seems slow in page rendering (or maybe even just DNS lookups) to me. I will still give Safari 2.0 a chance. Even if it is slower, some of the features may convince me to switch. Of course all of my ordering info is in my keychain with Camino. Anyone know if I can authorize Safari on these keys and have them work? I know nothing about keychain formats.

Jim

 

[SpaceMagic]

They say Safari 1.3 that came in 10.3.9 has the same core as Safari 2, so Safari 1.3 is probably about the speed that Safari 2 is going to be.

Safari 1.3 has made me switch back, from Firefox, so I will likely be on Safari, with Tiger too.

But also apparently, Safari 2 is faster again because it makes use of other Tiger only feautres and optimizations.

 

[mkrishnan]

I was actually thinking the same thing (as edesign), and I got a headstart (like apparently some others here) and decided to give Safari another go with 1.3. I'd forgotten how snappy some things are. And how nice in-line spell-checking is.

The main thing that annoyed me with FF at that particular moment is that I found that occasionally, FF would make entering text in a textbox (like replying to this message) *painfully* slow on my G4/800 iBook (which, admittedly, is not exactly the Aston Martin Vanquish of notebook computers). The thing is that the slow typing was NOT a function of...how many tabs were open (at least, closing other tabs did not make it go away), how many other apps were open (ditto), and rebooting FF did not always help. I've heard other people complain about this. Is there an effective fix?

Back to FF and Safari... things that matter for me (mostly dittos to the always insightful Mitthrawnuruodo):

In Safari 1.3's favor:
- Some aspects of the user experience are surprisingly fast
- Better keyboard shortcuts in some places (the tab switching is easier on the hands and more mac-consistent)
- Seems to be less of a memory hog -- at least, if I go and do something memory intensive, when I un-hide Safari, it seems to have to page in a lot less stuff than FF did
- In-line spell-check
- Acid search's new search site process is not quite as streamlined as FF's, but it does let you add custom sites much more easily than writing .src files. In addition to most of what I use on FF, I was able to get a version of PubMed that uses my school's EZProxy log-in and gives me full-text (from home), and I was also able to get Fed-Ex, UPS and USPS tracking in there, which I don't think are available for download for FF (maybe I shouldn't be so lazy, and I should write the plugins!)

In FF's favor
- As said before, the tabbed browsing experience, esp if you use TBE, has so many more useful options in FF. I especially miss...Apple-Shift-Z to unclose a tab, the ability to re-arrange tabs, and as Mitt said, a warning when I accidentally try to close the whole multi-tab Safari window
- Adblock really is better than PithHelmet, esp. considering no one wants me to pay them any money for it...
- Some sites have rendering issues in Safari 1.3, such as the Friendster example (not that I really go there a lot...I've gone there more in the past few days, to confirm for people that there's an issue, than I did all year! )

Well, though, I think Safari might be winning at the moment for me, again. But, besides Camino, don't forget, FF 1.1 is due in about a month, and better MacOS experience was on the priority list!

 

[brap]

I'll probably fire it up, you know, just for kicks. I very much doubt it'll be the default browser after it's cmd+q'd the first time, though.

Sure it'd probably work the way I want it if I spent the time to fiddle, but I already have a prefectly usable FF profile. So, no.

 

[leekohler]

I've always liked Safari.

 

[Orlando Furioso]

I've never had an issue with safari. In my experience, it has always performed better (overall) than Firefox. Although I love being able to select links by typing them out, a huge bug in safari, on my system anyway, keeps any resized window from being controlled via keyboard commands (even simple things like page up/page down/home/end etc). In fact, sometimes, when I resize just one, the rest are also affected and the only interactive element on the page is the scrollbar. As I dislike using a mouse (with a passion), this frustrates me when Im trying to navigate web pages. I prefer using safari because it, at least, is consistent.

 

[BornAgainMac]

I tried FF because people swore by it and I wanted to see what all the fuss is all about. It seems to provide a subset of what Safari does. Safari 2.0 seems to be the most feature rich browser on the planet and one of the fastest browsers. I am deleting FF on my Mac.

 

[feakbeak]

I've never had an issue with safari.

a huge bug in safari, on my system anyway

I'm confused, wouldn't the huge bug be considered an issue?

From my use with Safari in Panther I really liked the interface and some of the features, but Firefox won out on rendering times, which is important to me. I also like the selection of plug-ins, especially the mouse gesturing. Safari doesn't have plug-ins at all, does it? I haven't spent a great deal of time investigating Safari. I'm so used to Firefox on my PC that when Safari seemed sluggish at rendering I installed FF on my Mac mini rather quickly. I'm excited to take Safari 2 for a spin though. I plan on more thoroughly checking out all the features, provided the rendering times are comparable to FF.

 

[velocityg4]

I will continue to use Firefox. Unless the problem is fixed in ebay where you click the back button once and it reloading the effing page.

 

[mpw]

Has nobody else had a problem entering dates into internet booking forms etc. when using Safari? If not why am I, anyone got any ideas?

 

[buryyourbrideau]

i am a camino guy myself however all of my browsers seem to crash when i try to run a java app or vid...i dk why but camino for me has outperformed all other browsers...ill try safari 2.0 but for some reason i feel it just wont match up....plus i think mozilla will update FF and camino for the tiger release

 

[macbaseball]

I've used it from the time it came out and I will continue using it. It' slow at times, but I like the organization of bookmarks enough to keep using it.

 

[mkrishnan]

Even Disney's website wouldn't work with Safari, I'd pick a date say 15th from one dropdown menu and then a month and so on, hit submit and be told that it wouldn't accept 1/1/74 on something.

The Disney one seemed to work for me in Safari 1.3. The form appeared slightly Goofily, though. The listboxes were too big, and they overlapped each other slightly. But did not impair usability.

I'm not sure why you're having trouble with it. Do you have Javascript enabled?

 

[DaveP]

I was hoping that Safari 2 would implement some features I find lacking in the current version that FF does have.
find as you type
list of sites to allow pop-ups
warning when closing a window with multiple tabs
I saw that Nermal mentioned that Safari 2 doesn't have the last two of these. How about find as you type? I think that is an incredibly usefull feature.

I will definitely try Safari in Tiger and actually use it a good bit now. My 1 GHz G4 iBook is a little underpowered for what I use it for and I like that Safari takes up a far less percentage of my CPU than FF. So depending on what I else I am doing at the time I pick my browser. (For example, when surfing while waiting for large projects to compile in XCode, I use Safari).

 

[mkrishnan]

find as you type

Alongside the search bar improvement, AcidSearch has a find as you type feature. It produces a find bar at the bottom of the screen that is almost identical to the one in FF. It even has a cool find history thing in it (the type-in part of the bar, once you start typing, is sort of like the search tab at the top, with options if you click the mag glass on the left). The only thing that isn't ideal about it is that there are some limitations as to what keyboard shortcuts you can use -- you cannot steal the ones Safari uses, or replace Safari's find, so all the intuitive shortcuts go to the wrong find mechanism.

 

[mcmav37]

I did desert mainly because of google maps, but that apparently works in Safari now too. There are things I like more about Firefox and things I like more about Safari. The speed boosts will be nice, but I am definitely excited about the inline pdf viewing. That will bring me back. Hopefully the pop-up blocker will be fully effective again too.

 

[Savage Henry]

Chances are that I'll givie it a go, love the speeds, but still prefer FF for all the cool stuff I can do with it.

I doubt it will ever become my ruling 'browser' of choice, but it may keep me interested for a while.

 

[ZildjianKX]

I really disliked Safari in Panther and switched to Firefox. Firefox has so many unfixed bugs (even in the nightly builds) that it drives me nuts.

So far I like Safari in Tiger, but I really miss the RSS drop down menus from the Firefox menu bar, Safari's RSS support is great and all, but just lacks that feature.

One thing that does bug me in the new Safari is, try going to this website in the new Safari, and in Firefox:

http://www.craigslist.org

 

[Sutekidane]

I've been using both Safari and Firefox both extensively lately. I've had problems with both crashing every once in a while. I suppose there is no 100% stable browser. I do plan on using Safari more when I install tiger though.