Poll: Which Browser Are You?
There is a large number of browsers available for OS X; considerably more than for Windows or any other platform. Which, obviously, is a good thing! Depending on your needs however, any of these browsers could be the best one in your mind. What follows is a rough breakdown of 7 browsers for OS X with a quick note outlining their base appeal, along with some pros and cons for each.
Right after the quick breakdowns is a poll asking you to select which browser you prefer. I’m really looking forward to hearing your preferences and opinions, so here we go…
Firefox is all the rave in the PC world, but here on the Mac side it’s not really that big of a deal, as we have such a wide range of browsers to choose from. Firefox is a real powerhouse mind you. While takes up a good chunk of the system memory it also has support for a whole world of add-ons, which some people find they can’t live without (like web developers).
Pros: Add-ons, themes, cross-platform.
Cons: Not that native, a well known memory pig.
Who it’s for: Anyone who works daily on both Macs and PC for familiarity’s sake, and people who can’t live without Firefox’s powerful extensions; power people.
Camino, also by Mozilla, supposedly fixes the problems with Firefox for Macs that so many users complain about. Add-ons don’t work here, but there is a sweet cocoa interface and it is considerably faster than Firefox and most other choices.
Pros: Native interface, faster browsing than Firefox.
Cons: No official add-ons (check out Pimp My Camino), can’t re-order tabs.
Who it’s for: Anyone who wants a clean, fast browser based on the gecko rendering engine.
Safari is Apple’s web browser that ships for free with OS X and runs on the snappy Webkit rendering engine. It is obviously Cocoa based and its main focus is simplicity and usability, which it does very very well. If you’re on a Mac you are definitely using Safari to some degree. Am I wrong?
Pros: Native interface, integrated with Mac OS X, built-in RSS reader.
Cons: No tab button (must use Command-T), few advanced features.
Who it’s for: For Mac purists and people who want a browser that does stuff fast and simple.
OmniWeb has been around a while and is what many people might call a “premium” web browser. It’s a bit difficult to gauge its overall popularity but it certainly has its fans. According to some it has the features of all other web browsers, and then some. That some will cost you $15 though.
Pros: Native interface, many advanced features including: session saver, RSS capabilities, built-in ad blocking, visual tabs.
Cons: Costs $14.95.
Who it’s for: People who want lots of advanced features but can’t stand Firefox. Also I guess people with $15 to blow on a web browser.
Flock is a browser based on Firefox that is helpful on integration with Web 2.0 services like Flickr, Del.icio.us, and more. Flock also seems focused on the management of media on the web, but overall it seems a bit bloated. Flock was reviewed recently here.
Pros: Nice theme, integration with pretty much any web service that you can think of, blogging and RSS features, compatible with most Firefox add-ons.
Cons: Interface not particularly native, somewhat bloated.
Who it’s for: People who are signed up and using many Web 2.0 services and want a browser to work with them nicely. People looking to ditch Firefox but not its plugins.
From Japan comes a relatively new contender in Shiira, touted as the next browser for Mac. Shiira is also based on Safari’s webkit rendering engine, and in many people’s opinion takes Safari to the next level.
Pros: Native theme, very similar in feel to Safari, “PageDock” alternative to tabs shows a preview of pages, very fast.
Cons: Can’t re-order tabs, feature set limited but expanding with new releases. Users still reporting crash issues.
Who it’s for: People who are signed up and using many Web 2.0 services, are beta friendly, or interested in a sleak, newskool style of browser.
Hmm really what can you say about Opera that hasn’t already been said? Opera has been around a long time and really is a powerful and stable web browser with some interesting end-user features. There I said it.
Pros: Webpage speed-dialing, cross-platform, long life cycle, dedicated developers and community, helpful features for the disabled and elderly.
Cons: Interface not native (seems a bit dated), quite bloated and needs to be paired down by the user.
Who it’s for: Some of my University professors use Opera. If you’re elderly, disabled, or looking or a browser you can scale down Opera might be for you.
So what’s my choice? Camino. I used to use Firefox, but these days it just feels too slow for my casual surfing sessions. I miss a couple of the extensions for Firefox (like the webdev stuff), but Camino fulfills most of my needs for a browser. My next favorite after that will have to be Safari or Shiira. They’re just so snappy and simple.
What browsers do you use? Let us know by voting and if possible explain your reasons by commenting below.
I voted for Safari because it is my all day browser.
As a web developer I also use firefox a lot but I really don’t like it. Only the add-ons are interesting, what else ?
I also tried shiira and camino but I think I am addicted to safari (even if I still use safari 2)
Daily surfing: Safari
Webdev: Firefox and/or Safari + Web Inspector.
Here is MacApper’s browser stats over the last 30 days. Should be interesting to compare to the poll.
OmniWeb has been around almost longer than all the rest of these…was first released in the mid 90s.
[...] MacApper está fazendo uma pesquisa sobre a preferência dos usuários de Mac quanto ao seu navegador [...]
I got totally hooked on Flock v. 1.0 a few weeks ago, yet today I’m switching back to Safari.
The problem is, Flock makes my MBP really unstable. It took me while to discover that Flock was the culprit. And since the userbase is relatively small, Google or their FAQ / support pages has not been able to show me any kind of solution to several kernel hangs with only force reboot as an option.
Damn, it’s a bit sad as Flock has some nice features. But indeed it is bloated, and buggy. I Assume the gfx-card in my MBP is also a player in this unstability, but the same pages that makes Flock make my computer go down, works fine in Safari.
I prefer safari purely because it’s quick and relatively stable. But I sometimes use Camino.
If Safari had the ad-blocking capabilities of Camino, I’d be sorted!
No Tab button for Safari ? Check this :
http://pimpmysafari.com/plugins/safaributtons-027
Nothing beats firefox. The extensibility and the infinite amount of plugins out there is just enough to convert you. I use firefox on about 4 machines and they all have their bookmarks, history and cache synced automatically.
There are a couple of interesting posts at the tech brief and one of them is here I use social networks about twice a week, which is not enough to justify switching over from firefox to flock. With that said, I did download it and installed it and it works great. There are couple of posts at the tech brief and here is the link to one of them http://www.thetechbrief.com/2007/11/13/how-to-use-flocks-greatest-features/
Calling Opera “bloated” doesn’t do it justice. I would define “bloat” as a mixture of functionality-to-filesize ratio and memory usage, and here Opera leaves the other named browsers far behind. What you seem to have meant is that its interface is cluttered, which it might be compared to e.g. Firefox or Safari, but “bloated” is simply not true.
Camino, all the way. I used to be a firefox person but the part i loved the most, extensions, is what got me to camino. I LOVED extensions, maybe too much. I would have crash after crash. I then found camino and went cold turkey with no extension and I haven’t looked back.
I want to use Safari but one features stops that, i need separators for my bookmark lists. No go.
j
Unfortunately for intro into the article, a quick look in wikipedia show’s there are a lot more browser available on Windows than on Mac, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_shell), and I guess you could find more browser on Linux also.
Since all the browser you mention use one of the 3 main rendering engine on Mac (WebKit, Gecko and Presto), there is no way the Mac can have more browser than the other side that use the same 3 rendering engine + Trident (IE).
But I do think the browser on Mac ARE better and better looking
I just wanted put in perspective your first sentence
Im a Camino man (how the hell is IE beating Camino in our stats?!?! :p).
Simply put: I want gekko (or however you spell it) but hate firefox on the mac with a passion – it makes pages look so damn ugly.
I would probably use safari but for the lack of making new windows open in new tabs without a plugin.
I use firefox. I like safari, but a few things bug me about it. Safari has no “Undo Closed Tab” feature like Firefox, not that I have found anyway.
Also, in Firefox, I use the bookmark bar across the top of the browser. Safari has this too, but in Firefox, the websites icon appears beside the name. Nit picky, but I still like it.
safetyobc
I use Safari just because it’s there and does the job (plus the inspector thing is quite helpful when I occasionally do web design).
I dislike Firefox for its memory, speed and errr… is nativity the right word? Also I find the Gecko browsers to produce fairly ugly looking results, which also rules out Camino.
I tried OmniWeb once, but I doubt I’d use the features enough to warrant swapping from Safari. I also tried Flock but *hated* the interface. Shiira looks interesting though… might have to try that, but looking at the page I see no mention of it helping with Web 2.0 sites as mentioned here? Possibly you were thinking of Flock when that was written?
I used to be a Firefox fanboy but since I got a Mac I’ve slowly moved from it to Camino and now finally back to Safari. I love the way Firefox saves multiple passwords for sites and I wish Safari did this, along with ad-blocking.
I love Safari 3, it’s actually wonderful, but I can only use it for 30% of my browsing because of three fatal flaws.
1. There is no middle click to close tab that I know of, while the x to close is just too small for my liking.
2. No middle-click scrolling, browsing long pages with the scroll wheel takes FOREVER.
3. It’s zippy rendering engine is great for single pages, but if I open up multiple bookmarks at once, it freaks out my router, causing a severe hang!
These quirks just make it impossible to use all the time, and I just suffer through the anomaly of Firefox for mac not opening a new tab when I middle-click a bookmark (a problem STILL present in FF3 Beta!)
I think i’d prefer Camino, but I can’t live without the “all in one gestures” mouse gesture navigation extension for Firefox. I also use the Web Developer toolbar a lot.
Firefox has one significant NEGATIVE – no integration to Keychain and Address book. I do not wish to have multiple repositories for my passwords and addresses, just because the Firefox team primarily lives in the “every-program-for-itself” world of Windows. It is tough enough to maintain one list, much less keep a few sync’d manually.
Safari and Camino both integrate smoothly with Keychain and Address book, neither having to reinvent the wheel to work.
Voted for Camino as Safari still miss some web-based HTML text editor inside CMS like FKEditor on Plone.
It’s Safari for me, and I’ve tried many others. Why? Speed, Inquisitor, very clean RSS integration, and last, but not least, Sogudi + Quicksilver absolutely rocks!
Casual, everyday browing I use Safari for ease of use and the native interface. Any site that doesn’t function correctly in Safari I then open in Camino. I’ve begun preferring Camino lately, however for the speed and non-bloated feeling it provides my browsing.
I’m a Safari man. I keep Firefox around for the (exceedingly rare) page that won’t work properly in Safari, but it’s too unwieldy for regular use for me. The add-ons aren’t a big draw for me I just need a browser, not a circus that eats up all my RAM and overheats my PowerBook. I’ve tried Camino recently, but switched back to Safari today for several small but annoying reasons (i.e. the keyboard shortcuts for switching tabs in Safari use one hand, while Camino’s use both). I’ve also used Shiira and I love it to pieces I just wish it would get solidified and polished up a bit, so until then, Safari’s the one for me.
I must add – I would use Shiira if it wasnt for the fact that there is no way to export its bookmarks.
Therefore, any bookmarks made in Shiira are almost useless as they will be lost if you want to change browsers.
I am also a big 1Password user and there is no Shiira support (about the only browser that there isnt!).
But other than that, it shows a lot of promise.
I’ve always defaulted to Safari, but it was getting on my nerves so for a while I’d switched to Firefox. Since Safari 3 installed itself into my Tiger machines and I migrated one computer to Leopard I’ve gone back to Safari most of the time.
In what has to be the most incredible irony on the planet, the website that regularly gives me and all my coworkers trouble in Safari is the Apple Store.
I’m actually here today using Firefox because Safari claimed it couldn’t load an Apple product page. So I did two things: pasted the URL into Firefox and hit the Refresh button in Safari. The page came up quickly in Firefox while Safari eventually displayed an error. It’s as if Apple is saying “please buy our software, but don’t try to use it”.
Thanks for this piece. Firefox has always been my browser of choice because its cross platform and with a few plug-ins you can sync bookmarks. That said, it’s a big nasty beast! On your suggestion, I have been using Camino for the past day and, have to say, its pretty mean: fast!!!
Camino would be the best if it had draggable tabs. I really hope that is in the next update.
Firefox is ugly unless you use Firefoxy to give it mac-like form elements.
Opera is for the socially maladjusted. There’s like 5 people actually using it, and they’re all contrarian jerks. Every time I try to give it a chance the interface frustrates me.
Omniweb used to be good but I don’t see how they can justify charging $15 for a browser, let alone one that’s just using webkit.
Safari 3 isn’t bad but leave it open for too long and it gobbles up RAM.
I haven’t tried Shiira. Nice icon though.
Seems I’m one of the few to embrace Omniweb. I love the fact that I can set it up to react how I choose to situations, rather then the other way around. For example clicking on any external link opens a new tab. It is a cleaner interface and seems to respond faster then Safari or Firefox. My only complaint (yet its a biggy) is that it leaks memory faster then a sieve. Right now its eating 537MB of real memory, and it will get much, much higher then that.
Please sort out the memory requirements,
Take away Omniweb and I’ll take Opera, Cameo, Firefox then Safari in that order.
Am I the only one who can double click to the right of a Safari tab and get a new tab?
Maybe it’s a Saft thing.
Sometimes I’ve used http://www.sunrisebrowser.com/ for some cool features like resize window, zoom page and graphical bookmarks. A nice transparent live editing html code window present in 0.8 is now missing on last versions.
With latest Safari, it is really a very decent browser, but I have switched to Firefox, and right now running latest Firefox 3 beta on my Leopard hackintosh.
#10 That’s what I was thinking when I read the article.
Quoting # 10:
“a quick look in wikipedia show's there are a lot more browser available on Windows than on Mac”
Please have a look here:
http://darrel.knutson.com/mac/www/browsers.html
Sorry, web browser only are listed here:
http://www.pure-mac.com/webb.html
OSX 20 – Win 15
I like to keep it simple with Safari and Inquisitor. All the web-searching goodness this gal needs.
I started using firefox for a year ago and never looked back.
Having adblock, mouse gesture and possibility to add other nice features is invaluable.
Can agree about the memory use but that can be changed. In Most cases the problem is people allocate to much memory for cache and histor and then they use 10+ tabs. You can change these settings and reduce the memory use.
But still i think FF uses more memory then some other browsers but i dont mind since i have 2G and usually always 1G free. Also i can restart FF once a day
All and all i think FF is the best , for me atleast.
OmniWeb has been around since NextStep 3.0–it was the bomb then and it still is.
Features I can’t live without:
- The search bar can be so flexibly configured. I have 15 different searches configured so I can search quite a few different online dictionaries, versiontracker, wikipedia, weather, etc. It’s incredibly easy to add any web site’s search options right into the search bar.
- background web page update notification. Omniweb, on a site by site basis, can be configured to use free cycles on your computer to hit any site that’s in your bookmarks and put a checkmark next to it if there have been any updates since the last time you viewed that site. Very convenient
- text field editing. Any text field in any form can become a separate window for more convenient editing
- workspaces. Omniweb has had “Spaces” for web browsing for years (long before Leopard brought the feature to the Mac. You can have your “work” space, your “news” space, your pr0n space…
- per site preferences for type faces, encoding, etc. You can set preferences for individual web sites so when I hit those LOUSY foreign language web sites that don’t set a char set in the header (and of course anyone who actually works with multiple languages sets utf8 as their default encoding for their browsing), once set in the site preference, OW will switch to whatever lame encoding the site is using for me (even when the lame developers didn’t set the encoding in code)
The search bar flexibility alone is worth $15.
Another feature of Omniweb I forgot to mention…
Ad blocking. Omniweb basically automatically blocks the loading of graphics that fit certain size criteria coupled with the source of the image. I hate using other browsers when I go to a site to actually READ something but I’ve got flashing gifs and flash crap distracting me in the side bars. With OW, I get clean content.
You can also set it to animate animated GIFs ‘n’ number of times so those don’t end up distracting the heck out of you when you’re trying to get to the actual content of a site
Omniweb is THE web browser for Mac ! No concurrent.
All the web is accessible with shorts keystrokes or shortcuts, whatever searching or surfing. All objects are downloadable easily .
Only Safari 3 come close to him now with the help of some plugins.
I prefer Safari because I can use the snap back arrow to get back to where i started when links have taken me far off topic. Camino seems to play better with more sites, however, and if it had a snapback feature to-I’d use it until Safari reaches universal access to many morel web sites. (plus sometimes Safari hangs now that I’ve upgraded to Leopard.
[...] Breakdown & Poll: Which Browser Are You?MacApper – Toronto,Ontario,CanadaWho it’s for: Some of my University professors use Opera.If you’re elderly, disabled, or looking or a browser you can scale downOpera might be for you. … [...]
To Gand
On this page from wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers#Trident-based_browsers) you can count already 13 browser usint the Trident rendering engire, I know or already 2 browser using Webkit on Windows and more than 14 Gecko based browser.
Also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mac_OS_X_web_browsers
24 OS X browser
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Windows_web_browsers
42 Windows browser
p.s. I’m a fervent Mac user and defender, but the truth is the is more browser on Windows than on Mac, and most of them are more mature in fonctionnality, don’t read better, they are just older with full fonctionality with an awfull rendering engine
Most browser based on Webkit are really yong and still not as fonctionnal as the 3 main : Safari, Shiira and OmniWeb. Apart from Firefox, Camino, Flock and Netscape/SeaMonkey/Mozilla Suite, most the the other Gecko based browser are simple shell over Gecko and don’t have many features not in their big brother.
Don’t get me wrong again, I love my Mac and I would never even work on Windows but there ARE more browser on Windows, just more bad one
Stephane said:
“…but there ARE more browser on Windows, just more bad one”
Right, quantity is not quality, often less is more.
Question is about layout engines:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_layout_engines
And, first of all, if these engines are free or proprietary.
Calling Opera ‘bloated’ is a little harsh don’t you think? Sure it has a ton of feaures that most people might not use, but the beauty is that none of it interferes or slows down the rest. It doesn’t forceyou to use them. They are just there.
Plus it has such a tiny installation package. I hardly think you can call it bloated.
As for interface, the new kestrel(9.5) builds are supposed to look more native and have a more paired down interface by default.
[...] Poll: Which Browser Are You? | MacApper qual browser você é? (tags: browsers mac) [...]
I’ll also stick up for Opera. It’s smaller and faster than most. And, out-of-the-box, it’s got mouse gestures (cleaner ones than the Firefox plugin IMHO). True, it doesn’t have Firefox’s plugins and it’s skins aren’t pretty, but Breeeze Simplified Micro gives me the most compact interface I’ve seen on any other browser. With mouse gestures, who needs to find the ‘back’ button, anyway?!
Gand said:
“Right, quantity is not quality, often less is more.”
That’s why I say in my first comment :
“I just wanted put in perspective your first sentence.”
As for the browser I use :
1 – Safari for basic use and web development
2 – Firefox when I need to test something
3 – Use to be all about Camino when it was still called Chimera
4 – Did use OmniWeb way before there was any other good alternative
[...] Poll: Which Browser Are You? | MacApper qual browser você é? (tags: browsers mac) [...]
@ ziggypop: No, it´s a standard behaviour. But stupidly enough, you have to open the first tab manually with ⌘T.
I´d prefer Shiira if all of its features actually worked and if it didn´t crah all the time…
Camino all the way.
It’s zippy and I just like to keep my browser free of stuff. Just the essentials. Sometimes Safari, just to remind me of how much I love camino.
Hasn’t OmniWeb been proven on multiple occasions to render pages faster than other browsers available?
That’s why I use it and that should probably be mentioned in the “Pros”.
I voted for Safari because I’m a hardcore Mac user and I download safari for all the computers running windows in this house.
My second choice would definitely be firefox. All computers running mac or windows in this house all have safari and firefox.
i’m one of the 17 people who voted for shiira. i’m trying to use shiira as my main browser to see how it can hold up. one thing i’m constantly surprised by it is that it’s REALLY fast. it seems like such a “bloated” and full featured browser that you would expect to chug along, but it doesn’t act that way at all.
my favorite part right now is having the pagedock on the left side, which works well on widescreens because you don’t really need that wide of browsing space.
it crashes once in a while, and for some reasons, bookmarks don’t work unless they’re in the bookmark bar. i don’t understand it’s rss implementation, and there’s all sorts of wierdness happening, but overall, it’s a real contender if it had more developers. considering the teams developing each, i’d say that shiira is doing pretty darn good.
Hi,
For tabs in Safari, there is a very useful tool called TwiceTab (http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/internet_utilities/twicetab.html), that allows double-click to open a new tab.
FREE DOWNLOADS OF WINDOWS VISTA THEMES
yes indeed…
I’ve used Internet Explorer all my life. I just switched to Opera and I perfer Opera over IE because I need speed,and Opera is waaaaay faster than IE
I have used every browser that was evaluated here. One of my main things I want in a browser is Speed and then versitility that makes surfing a pleasure. That means that I hooked on Opera. I started with Safari for a while when first on the net, then came firefox and I used it for probably the longest of all. Needless to say but I never stop looking for the perfect one so along came Flock which is great for me doing Ebay because of its intergration with Flickr and being able to see the phots in my acct. Then came Opera and this one looks the best and works the best for me. I love the amount of customizing that is in this one also. Well I think I thats enough … thanks
Nimbler.
Opera become non stable last year- crashes, crases, crashes… Firefox is the best!
Camino. I used Safari for awhile when I first got my Mac, but wasn’t completely satisfied with speed or ease of use…so I tried Firefox, but too ugly and PC for me. Then Opera, but couldn’t get used to it. I never tried Omni because I’m not someone who as $15 for a browser…Shiira I liked and used for awhile, but the crashing eventually irritated me too much and I ditched it to try Camino, and i’ve never gone to anything else. Camino is fast and has a very non-bloated, easy-to-use and easy-on-the-eyes interface and layout. Very Mac-like, particularly with a little tweaking from Pimp My Camino. Love it, Camino for me all the way!
I’ve voted for firefox, but i came here, because i wanted to switch. I hasitate between shiira and camino.
Firefox is becoming really slow, and its not native.
Right now i’m trying shiira.
But i already misses some functions, like ‘undo close tab’.
Ofcourse Mozilla Firefox!
I am using it since 2007 and work awesome, but sometimes slowly (when I have more than 50 tabs in firefox).
Google Chrome Duh
and oppra for wii
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