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!

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

3 Stations East

Building the Perfect OS X Browser