3 Stations East

Building the Perfect OS X Browser

nobody@vox.com(Paul) — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 21:52:37 -0500

So yeah, I played with Camino 1.5 for a week before I went crawling back to Firefox. And I've been off-and-on with Safari 3.0 beta all day. It's frustrating because all three of these browsers come very close to what I want in a browser but none of them pegs it perfectly.

Thus, my review of the current state of OS X browserdom and which pieces would make the Perfect OS X Browser.

Firefox 2.0.0.4
The best thing about Firefox: extensions. The second: cross-platform consistency. If I can make a site work in Firefox on the Mac, I know it'll look just dandy on the PC. Safari has matched that feature now, of course, but the extensions in FF are what bring me back. That, and the Undo The Tab I Just Closed By Accident command... it has saved me countless times.

However, it's a stupid memory hog. I don't care if it's the browser or the extensions I'm running... it's a mess. I hate the spinning beachball. The interface, even with GrApple, is still kind of a mess.

Camino 1.5
Love it. Great, great stride forward. Feels fast and zippy. Fits in to OS X very well. Feels leaner than Firefox. I appreciate that it's the same rendering engine, too... no having to worry about CSS breaking a beautiful layout.

But I can't move tabs? And I can still only store one username/password per domain name? And it's nice that there's a Flash blocker included, as well as an ad blocker, but (like Safari) that's not too useful if I can't whitelist sites.

I really do like Camino, but those little things just bug me a lot. Maybe 1.6 will fix 'em.

Safari 3 beta
Boy, does this look weird on a PC. I couldn't test it with a work app, which required an authenticated login - it crashed. On the Mac, it's very fast. Being able to move tabs? Great. The ability to move tabs off the tab bar into their own windows? Great! I still like the streamlined, clean interface. It's better at typography than Firefox and Camino.

But the new search? It kicks ass. It is easily the best search implementation I've seen in an app since Coda. They're tied, in my mind. Safari will actually highlight all the matches on a page and pop them up a bit. Once you've tried it, you'll think every other browser needs it too.

The cons? Uhm... hm. Other than what I've grown used to with Firefox... there... aren't... any really. It's a beta. Oh, that's one! It's a beta.

I'm going to stick it out with Safari 3 for a little while. But those Firefox extensions might be too much for me to miss.

The Perfect OS X Browser
It really is too bad that not any single browser has nailed everything perfectly. Firefox has a sucky UI; Camino's latest version just got outpaced by Safari; Safari's lacking expandability (to some degree.)

So for me, the perfect browser would include:

Firefox extensions;
Both the Gecko and WebKit rendering engines;
Safari's tab implementation, in-page search, and bookmark management;
Firefox's DOM inspector;
Safari's UI;
Camino's slick-looking "warning panels" (for pop-ups, etc.).

That's it. As you can see, things aren't too far off. Truly if Camino had extension support - the real deal - I think that would be the winner.

In any case I give Apple credit for their power play today, in making Safari the uber-platform for iPhone, Mac, and Windows web development. Well done!

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Browser Gripes

nobody@vox.com(Paul) — Fri, 04 May 2007 20:05:18 -0500

So I switched back to Safari last week after using Firefox forever. I just can't seem to settle on a good browser on the Mac - I haven't been able to in a long time. I'll probably go back to Firefox though.

Safari feels faster and more solid than Firefox. I like the speed, I love the minimal interface. I don't like the fact that Vox doesn't work with it (hello!) and neither does Google Adsense, I've found - the latter is a new revelation as it did work previously.

I'd use OmniWeb as I still love it but, it has all of the Safari issues plus the Ping's CMS makes it crash for some reason. (It's just rendering a control, for goodness sake.)

Camino? If I'm going to do the Gecko core then I want all of the extensions too, so I might as well just run Firefox.

Firefox is still a bit of a resource hog and feels really, really cobbled together on the Mac. It just feels alien, and that's unfortunate because its feature set is still good (OmniWeb's is better.) I think what I want is OmniWeb with the Gecko core. That would rock my socks.

Until then, my socks will hum a little tune instead. Sigh.

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No WebKit Love

nobody@vox.com(Paul) — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 09:48:48 -0600

So I'm trying out OmniWeb 5.5 again, given it's on sale this month, and am a little surprised Vox still doesn't offer Safari (WebKit) support.

I know Firefox is an option, and it's a great browser. But Safari being the "default" on a Mac holds some weight, no?

Anyway... Firefox will stick around for cross-platform testing, as always (and indeed that's why I've stuck with it - that and 2.0 is pretty good). But OmniWeb is still the most comfortable browser I've used on Ye Olde iMac.

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