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Firefox handily beats Safari—at least for now
June 12, 2007 | 11:30 am
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By David Rothman
Just gave the new Safari 3 for Windows a quick drive. The download page is here.
I’ll stick with Firefox because Safari is far from done. For example, with Firefox, I can use my mouse wheel with Ctrl to shrink or blow up the words on the screen. Not so with Safari. It does have a Ctrl+ kind of alternative, but that wasn’t working when I tried it. This is a show-stopper for me.
Security threat
On top of everything else, there is a malware threat and Safari lacks the rich collection of plug-ins that Firefox has.
Not that Firefox is perfect: It’s a memory hog and crashes too often. But I’ll stick with it.
E-book angle
Safari comes with a built-in RSS reader and maybe in time that could turn into something capable of helping to capture networked books. Not to mention the possibility of other forms of native e-book support, or plug-ins.
Adobe Reader, in fact, is one of the existing plug-ins.
Pro-Safari arguments—well, claims
Apple brags of “Blazing performance, Easy Bookmarks, Pop-up Blocking, Inline Find, Tabbed Browsing, SnapBack, Forms AutoFill, Built-in RSS, Resizable Text Fields, Private Browsing, Security” (numbers deleted from list).
Hmm. On my HP Pavilion, Safari was slower than Firefox when I tested it on the TeleBlog, and you already know about the security issues. Hey, Apple fans, I recognize that this is a beta. Maybe Safari will improve.
Other opinions welcomed! Remember, these are just first impressions.
Update, 2:40 p.m.: I’m not the only one with reservations. See comments in Alice Hill’s blog, for example. Also see the inevitable Slashdot discussion and various news stories via Google. Plus Bill Janssen’s more-Safari-friendly comments. Also check out the Wired News blog item with helpful speed measurements.
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Comments:
hi
I don’t think Safari will win converts from the Firefox crowd (though those people will probably install a copy just to play with it sometimes).
But keep in mind, the majority of the browsers out there is Internet Explorer and it will definitely beat that.
If Apple finds a smart way to distribute it e.g. bundle it with iTunes then it may find a way to people’s desktops and once they try it they’ll stop using IE.
Pretty good analysis, Tamas. Of course we’d both rather see people switch from IE to Firefox rather than to the Safari. Wouldn’t it be great if quality prevailed over marketing? One can dream. Thanks. David
There are multiple segments to “the Firefox crowd”. There are those who use it (and fight for it) as a philosophical crusade, and those who use it because it’s really useful. You’re right to think that the first segment won’t shift to Safari, but the second segment is up for grabs.
I use Macs, and have tried to become a Firefox user, instead of a Safari user, but there’s always been some incremental functionality of Safari that Firefox (on the Mac) has lacked. For instance, the Java plug-in support for Firefox on the Mac doesn’t properly pass secure session cookies to the Java runtime — a really esoteric consideration that made Firefox too inconvenient for me to use.
I think the real “meat” here is support for HTML5 and various other extensions, which no doubt will surface in Dashboard/iPhone extensions to the standard Javascript browser API. But HTML5 is itself quite an upgrade from standard HTML4; Porter-Duff alpha-channel compositing, client-side storage for persistent state, extensive support for embedded “rich media”, and a re-working of the old HTML forms model. And the Mozilla crowd (Firefox) is also part of the group that’s spurred the development of HTML5.
People interested in performance comparisons will want to look at Dave Hyatt’s blog; Dave was a Firefox developer who moved to the Safari team. And it’s worth noting that Adobe Apollo (now AIR) is also based on WebKit, the framework under Safari. AIR has made quite a splash lately.
Of course, you won’t be able to install Firefox on your iPhone. You’ll have to use Safari-based technology to read your ebooks there.
In fact, the reason for bringing out a beta of your software is to enlist help from the community in finding exactly the kinds of issues you detail. (I hope you reported the problems you found to Apple, in addition to discussing them here.)
As to the performance, beta software is normally compiled with as much debugging/error checking code enabled as possible, it certainly wouldn’t surprise me that the beta would be slower than the production version.
In any case, remember that beta software is put out so that you can help the developers produce the application that *you* want to run. If you don’t want to participate by reporting bugs etc., don’t run beta software. A beta is not (yet) production quality, so you shouldn’t use it in production environments, nor should you expect to be comparable to production version of other browsers.
I’m not sure I’m particularly pro-Safari, but (for me) using Windows seems a bit like going swimming with a cinder block chained to your ankle, and I switched from Suns to Macs before Firefox became usable, so I don’t really have nearly as much experience with Firefox as I do with Safari. There’s a nice Mac-ish version of Firefox called “Camino”, but there are enough gotchas with it that I can’t effectively use it. I think the horserace between WebKit-based browsers and Gecko-based browsers has become very interesting.
[Moderator's note: I changed "pro-Safari" in the main post to "more-Safari-friendly." - David.]