january 18, 2008When I upgraded from Tiger to Leopard, I swore I'd give Safari a good try. When I told Alice, she only blurted, "Ugh, why?" I don't know, I guess because it is the built-in browser? And because I was using it on my iPhone. I just started using Firefox on my Powerbook instead of Safari. I couldn't take Safari anymore. Safari is the Internet Explorer of the MacOS X world -- built-in web-browser, enabled by default, and just horrible. Safari has two things going for it. The first is that it is damned fast. The second is that it renders fonts beautifully. Other than those two:
- It may render fonts beautifully, but it can't render anything correctly. CSS flaws cause text to go white on white while viewing JR's page. And all sorts of other funniness.
- Javascript is broke -- I haven't checked with Safari 3, but this is a good example in Safari 2.
- It does not work with Wordpress' Rich Editor. Whenever I "Save and Continue", "Save" or "Publish" an article: All html tags get stripped. Very annoying. Works fine in Firefox.
- I. Need. My. Delicious. There is no button for del.icio.us in Safari and no way to add one. All I can do is add a bookmarklet to my bookmarks bar. Yes, that works -- but not as elegantly as the del.icio.us add-on for Firefox. The del.icio.us add-on for Firefox lets me highlight text on a page before hitting the Tag button. When I hit the Tag button, all that text is automagically pasted into the notes section for saving. Handy.
- Hitting Option-Command-F to do a websearch is very annoying. The Option and Command are either right next to each other (hard to hit while trying to simultaneously hit F with the same hand) or on opposite sides of the space bar (better, but still two command keys plus a letter key?). With Firefox it is simpler: Command-K.
- Google is nice, but I want to use Yahoo! Search. There is no default (without hacking) way of changing the search engine in the Mac version of Safari. In the Windows version you can select a search engine from the Preferences, same with the iPhone version -- why does Apple force Mac users to use Google only?
- Double-click for a new tab. In Firefox, if I want a new tab (and I have space in the tabs bar), I can just double-click an empty space in the tabs bar and wham: New tab! Not so in Safari.
- No Linux support. Firefox supports all three platforms that I work in: Mac, Linux and Windows. Safari? Only two: Mac and Windows.
I did what I swore: I gave Safari a good try. It failed me on the Mac, so I am going back to reliable Firefox. The only reason that I now have to use Safari is to manage bookmarks for my iPhone.
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