Comments on: Why is Safari So Popular?

By: Me

Me — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 17:06:59 +0000

If you get the beachball thats not normal. Reset Safari to clear everything out. Like others i prefer the UI and text quality of safari over Firefox. I will also ever understand why noone else implemnts text size controls in the toolbar like Safari does. I use it all the time. I use NetNewsWire for RSS and don’t understand why anyone would use a browser for RSS unless you don’t have alot of feeds. Maybe then. As muach as I am on the web I don’t remember any issues with any web sites with Safari in it’s most recent versions.

By: Dan Shockley

Dan Shockley — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 16:20:17 +0000

Firefox supports almost none of the Mac OS X text-editing keyboard shortcuts. It even does NOTHING when you are in a single-line text field and hit the down-arrow. That is a Windows behavior that makes me nuts. If I’m in a text field that only has a single line, what could I possibly want to do when I press down-arrow? Nothing? No, I must want to go to the end of the line. That’s just the most annoying text-editing issue.

I do use Camino right now. I’m a registered OmniWeb customer, but its performance was starting to really give me trouble. If they update it for Intel-based Mac, I’ll probably go back. No other browser automatically saves your browsing state (open windows/tabs/etc) and no browser supports AppleScript as well (even Safari) – tabs do not exist in any browser’s AppleScript support except for OmniWeb. The ironic thing is that one of the biggest reasons you’d want access to all the tabs is to save the URLs you’re viewing, and the only browser that lets you do that doesn’t need it.

By: Scott

Scott — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 12:12:23 +0000

Clarification on my earlier post: I think the only real difference in file-saving (HTML) is that Safari defaults to a more intelligent file name than Camino.
My biggest problem with Safari is that I seem to get the beachball a lot, especially when working with lots of tabs. Maybe that’s just me?

By: George Lien

George Lien — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 09:19:23 +0000

I use Opera, and only use Safari or FireFox when neccessary.

By: Doug

Doug — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 05:15:32 +0000

Why are people even trying to figure this out or trying to convince people. For me it is not one piece, but the whole widget (although the integration of the spellchecker for things like this posting is one of the big ones). I have noticed that I like the look of Safari over other browsers but this is not just the button look or the position of them it is things like the dual purpose stop reload, the progression bar url display combo. It is also about the controls on the pages looking more mac like. I like the close boxes on the tabs, the load speed and even the snap back button. If a site denies me I just use the debug menu to change my user agent.

I’d bet that with the plugins I could duplicate much of this or even all of this but why should I when safari already has it? Bottom line both are great browsers and there is room on my hard drive for both but safari is without a doubt my default.

By: Scott

Scott — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 23:12:25 +0000

For all the people who choose Safari over Firefox because of its better tab behavior, Camino’s tabs behave like Safari’s. If you’re pre-Tiger in your OS, Camino will be faster, too. Safari’s file-saving is cleaner, though.

By: Bob

Bob — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 20:49:32 +0000

I used Firefox for quite a while, but now use Safari the vast majority of the time. The main reason? Online education. eCollege doesn’t support Firefox (last time I checked), so I had to use the User Agent Switcher extension. I finally got sick of it, when I knew I had a browser that I didn’t have to tinker with to get it to work. Safari seems to use a lot less of my RAM as well, and it is definitely faster than Firefox.

I strongly prefer the Firefox method of handling RSS feeds over Safari. I’ve never gotten used to Safari’s style in that regard. I’d rather see the title of the article and decide if I want to read it than to have to pull the entire article just to see what it is. I would guess that if I could have used Firefox natively for school, I would have never switched back to Safari last year.

By: tony marrtin

tony marrtin — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 20:45:34 +0000

I use both. Safari is great for downloading, esp. Widgets and some sites do look better. FireFox seems to be more compatible with sites designed for IE, and I love the EXTENSIONS feature, I have a few that make it a truly wonderful browser. I hate the FireFox buttons though, they are square and boring like the ones in a PC browser. I use each about 50-50.

By: David H Dennis

David H Dennis — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 15:10:18 +0000

I like Safari’s support for Emacs text editing (control-F, control-B, etc, etc). This is because Safari uses native widgets instead of Firefox’s cross-platform widgets. These keystrokes are embedded in my fingers and if they don’t work I get very cranky.

It seems odd that an open source product would not copy emacs-style text editing, since a healthy percentage of people who use FireFox probably edit in emacs, and emacs is truly an open source icon. But that’s what happened. Steve Jobs wound up being far more thoughtful to his customers than JWZ and team were to theirs. No matter what else you can say about Steve, he really goes the extra mile to make us happy.

I also echo Safari’s more attractive and more compact look.

However, when I get errors I can’t figure out, I try FireFox because it does have much better error reporting, even when Safari’s debug menu is considered.

By: Scott

Scott — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 14:44:40 +0000

I use Firefox as a backup when I Safari fails me. For me this is one banking site. What really annoys me about Firefox is the localization practice does not follow Mac practices. This means I need two copies of Firefox for two different languages. Instead, Safari gives me 15 languages initially, and adding another localization is a relatively painless process.