Firefox vs. Safari
March 21st, 2005 Posted in InternetBack in the dark ages when I used a PC I turned to Firefox when Internet Explorer became too much of a pain. But since becoming a Mac user over a year ago I’ve been happily using the default Mac browser, Safari. I’ve been quite happy with it’s fluid motion and the pleasing way it displays web sites.
But lately I’ve noticed it running slowly. It happens when I’m running several tabs and/or windows: suddenly everything stops and the cursor turns into that little rainbow ball and spins for a while. After six or eight seconds it stops and I can do something again. It only slows Safari–every other program is fine–but it keeps me from being as productive as I could be in Safari.
This spinning rainbow finally got on my nerves in the past week or two and I decided to give Firefox a shot. So far I’m liking it.
It doesn’t display web pages nearly as well as Safari–I don’t want to sound hoity-toity, but Safari almost had a beauty to it. Firefox seems a little more utilitarian–drop downs and text fields don’t look as nice. But the biggest bonus is no more spinny rainbow. I tried to recreate situations that typically caused spinny rainbows in Safari, and Firefox seems to be pause-free. Can any Mac heads out there tell me why that is?
Another upside: I can see all the little HTML helps in Movable Type, which is awfully nice. How did I do without those? (though I notice it uses ‘em’ instead of ‘i’ for italics and ’strong’ instead of ‘b’ for bold. Any reason for that? Which one’s better? Does it matter if I use both in my code?)
The only annoying thing so far is that Firefox didn’t automatically import my Safari bookmarks. It asked to import from Opera (wha? Do I even have Opera?), but that was it. I’ve tried importing from a file, but that didn’t seem to do anything (or I imported the wrong file). Recreating my bookmarks would be a pain.
3 Responses to “Firefox vs. Safari”
By Mike Atkinson on Mar 21, 2005
I wouldn’t know anything about elegance. I’ve been a Windows guy since Day 1. ha
(Well, almost, it was DOS, THEN Windows.)
And take a look at my site now. It should work fine in Firefox Mac…
By schdav on Mar 22, 2005
i and b have been deprecated in favor of em and strong, as those are a little more abstracted terms as all browsers don’t necessarily italicize or bold things when told to.
I tried firefox when I first got my powerbook, but got sick of it’s ugliness and strange focus problems (meaning that sometimes windows wouldn’t react to mouse clicks or form fields wouldn’t let you click them and enter text/select something). I heard that this is because they still use the old OS 9 style rendering engine, while safari naturally uses the new Quartz stuff. At one point there was going to be a 1.1 release for the mac that switched to the new display engine, but with the way the moz. foundation has been going, I’m not sure what the current status of that is.
By almeda on Jul 7, 2005
It’s funny — I have kind of the reverse situation. I’ve been using Firefox almost exclusively since [and before] I got my iBook. I just upgraded to OS X Tiger, and because, or maybe coincidentally, I’ve started to get the little spinny rainbow thing while using *Firefox*, so I’ve had to switch to Safari for everyday use.
Wish I could figure it out. You’re right, input text/submit butons, etc., are a lot nicer with Safari, but there are some things I just miss about Firefox. [entering searches directly into the address bar, e.g.]