Safari or Firebird?

november 4, 2003

So, I got tired of seeing that huge banner ad at the top of HowardForums. Also, with non-authoritative SSL certificates, I got tired of answer "yes" to the dialogue box all the time. Safari is a great webbrowser from Apple, but I think it still has a ways to go with some features. I have downloaded Mozilla's Firebird 0.7.1 for Mac OS X and am using it now on my iBook in lieu of Safari for the time being. Firebird just provides a better browsing experience when compared to Safari. All the annoyances are gone, the ad disappears with the userContent.css trick and I can accept a SSL certificate permanently. Plus, I can import my bookmarks from Yahoo! Bookmarks and also I use Firebird on my Windows and Linux boxes, so it's a seamless move between boxes. Some of the widgets in Firebird (including the busy cursor) do not look like Mac widgets, so they are an ugly eye sore when compared to Safari, but for now, I think the minor cosmetic trade off is worth it. I tried Camino also, using the latest nightly build since there hasn't been an official release in a while. Camino, which can also use the userContent.css trick seemed broken for Panther. The scrollbar no longer functioned correctly! But, the regular (June 2003) build of Camino works just fine. It almost looks like the Camino project has stopped. I hope not because that is one of the best Cocoa browsers around (it is a Cocoa version of the Mozilla engine, looks just like a Mac OS X app and works great). Also, for Firebird, if I visit [url=http://www.breitling.com]Breitling[/url], the animation on the main page just kills Firebird, whereas Safari handles it gracefully. Maybe I'll just have to switch between Firebird, Safari and Camino -- though I still plan to stay with Firebird and Camino most of the time.


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