mac: camino vs firefox vs safari

[spants]

as a new mac user, I am trying all the options....

I like safari and camino but I miss the adblock plugin for firefox so I seem stuck with it.
Have any of you more experienced users got a favourite browser?
regards
Tony

[SystemParanoia]

Opera

[cjs]

I use Firefox and am happy with it, love adblock and the way it does spell check in Hotmail & PH for me. Never really got on with Safari, it just didn't feel right first time, there again I've never given it a chance as I'm happy with Firefox!

[PJR]

I use Safari. Not had any real issues with it. Very occasionally there are websites which dont work properly with it. So I have FireFox installed as a backup. With just those 2 browsers installed I can view every website just fine.
There are a few ad blockers for Safari. Pithhelmet is perhaps the most popular. But in my experience it makes Safari unstable. Still, there are others to try. One I have used, is this, which i think is good. http://sagefire.org/2007/06/28/goodvibrationscss-a...

P,

[cyberface]

OmniWeb right at the beginning (Cheetah 10.0)...



Then Chimera (remember that? got renamed Camino due to some OSS project naming problem, nothing to do with TVR) - used Firefox optimised G5 nightlies for a while but preferred how Camino looked.

I always preferred the Aqua-like Camino 'look' to the brushed-metal Safari browser... however now I use Safari 3 and would only consider Camino as a backup browser.

You see, the biggest issue for me with a browser (other than the ability to render pages properly) is keychain integration with Mac OS X. Website passwords / forum passwords / shop logins - all in the OS X user Keychain. Which is conveniently synchronised across all my Macs via dot Mac, as are all my bookmarks. So change the bookmark bar in Safari on my workstation, next day when I've opened up my laptop on client site and connected to the internet, the bookmark bar will update with my changes.

Likewise for passwords in the keychain. Firefox used its own password store, which it had to (cross-platform being paramount, and Keychain being an OS X-only feature), which was irritating to back up as well. Camino did keychain integration which was great, but I switched over to Safari just before Leopard when beta 3 was released, since there seemed to be some schism between the Camino guys and the Firefox guys... and Camino was behaving very buggy on my Quad G5. Constant crashing gets *very* irritating when you're a Mac user and not used to apps constantly crashing!!! It brought me back to Windows 3.1... Even Internet Exploder was *never* that bad (and I'm talking about the Mac version of Internet Explorer, which was utterly execrable)...

Opera? Tried it once when you had to pay for it... it had advert banners and stuff and got ditched immediately. OmniWeb looked beautiful in the early versions of Mac OS X (and I understand Omni have revived it) but they've got a *long* way to go to get people to pay for a web browser, given how ubiquitous they are now...

Any old-time OS X users still using OmniWeb - is it worth trying again? I think Omni's products (in general) rock - I use OmniGraffle professionally on every contract, and score every time on having 'teh prettay' presentations... Visio users always ask me how I get the drop shadows etc. - when I say 'OmniGraffle' they look at me as if I'm insane. Which isn't too far from the truth, I guess. Mwuahahahaahaaaa

[Leithen]

I've stopped using Camino since installing Leopard - not sure whether it was a PPC problem, but it started to hog memory and crash too often. Since then I've persevered with Safari and on the whole it's pretty good.

[cyberface]

Errr yes I've just realised that I missed the whole point of my addled ramble.

Safari 3 on Leopard has an effective adblock available now.

Here - open source and maintained too. I use it regardless of website T&Cs... especially forums where adverts used to be static pic ads (which I have absolutely no problem with) but now download a large Flash animated distraction on every page.

I hate Flash, and it's slow on the Mac and a waste of resources, both CPU cycles, memory and bandwidth. My main workstation is left on 24/7 and needs to be contactable from the internet... I used to use Camino's adblock but in the period between switching to Safari and using the new Safari adblock, I had to quit Safari and all open pages when leaving the office, since the constant memory leak caused by the Flash Player would eventually exhaust my RAM. This was with 4.5 GB on a Quad G5...

Some of my favourite forums are now displaying epilepsy-inducing flashing-picture-type Flash adverts. I despise them. On the forums that allow it, I pay a subscription to avoid the ads. On forums with no option, I block all Flash as a matter of course. I don't have a problem with the concept of advertising, just the execution of ing annoying flashing shit - generally the headache-inducing shit is Flash and easy to block, but a few advertisers make animated GIFs that are just as offensive.

Anyway enough of the rant. Safari can now block the annoying stuff, whilst still leaving the 'plain' ads that may be interesting if targeted properly (specialist servicing for the car you own, etc.) - only trouble is that it's a SIMBL plugin, which can be avenues for security breaches, and it's not 100% sure whether Apple will continue to let SIMBL stuff run, or whether it'll be disabled in a point release at some point. Regardless, there's a lot of people wanting an ad-blocking solution for Safari and an active development community.

[spants]

cyberface - thanks for the tip!

Now using safari with adblock and it is working well

Tony

[Murph7355]

PJR said:

I use Safari. Not had any real issues with it. Very occasionally there are websites which dont work properly with it. So I have FireFox installed as a backup. With just those 2 browsers installed I can view every website just fine...

x2

Prefer Safari, but Firefox covers the odd lazy barsteward web developer who has to try and be clever.

[sawman]

i used camino for a while, but it would crash from time to time (esp on ph!) so it had to go, like everyone else I seen to use safari keeping firefox for site that are not safari savvy.

s

[cjs]

I want to give Safari another go and see if I can get to like it. One thing I can't work out. In the Address Bar there is no drop down arrow as per Firefox or IE, can that be added? Quite often I just want to drop down my history and click on a recently visited site, can I do this on Safari?

[Leithen]

cjs said:

I want to give Safari another go and see if I can get to like it. One thing I can't work out. In the Address Bar there is no drop down arrow as per Firefox or IE, can that be added? Quite often I just want to drop down my history and click on a recently visited site, can I do this on Safari?

Click and hold the back button?

[nightfever]

cjs said:

I want to give Safari another go and see if I can get to like it. One thing I can't work out. In the Address Bar there is no drop down arrow as per Firefox or IE, can that be added? Quite often I just want to drop down my history and click on a recently visited site, can I do this on Safari?

That is pretty much my only complaint. When I asked on here, someone suggested putting regularly used site in a bookmark folder and putting the folder on the bookmark bar. It works, but it isn't the same. I've been searching for a plug-in but there aren't many good ones for Safari.

I have Firefox in case something doesn't work on Safari but that doesn't happen very often.

[cjs]

Leithen said:

cjs said:

I want to give Safari another go and see if I can get to like it. One thing I can't work out. In the Address Bar there is no drop down arrow as per Firefox or IE, can that be added? Quite often I just want to drop down my history and click on a recently visited site, can I do this on Safari?

Click and hold the back button?

But that will only help with the current session. I mean the drop arrow in the address bar, it keeps your history for a determined time on FF or IE. It's far quicker to find your most used sites then going into Bookmarks.

[Zod]

I've given up on any Mac browser other than Safari for 99% of possible purposes now.

[Gentleman Geoff]

cjs said:

Leithen said:

cjs said:

I want to give Safari another go and see if I can get to like it. One thing I can't work out. In the Address Bar there is no drop down arrow as per Firefox or IE, can that be added? Quite often I just want to drop down my history and click on a recently visited site, can I do this on Safari?

Click and hold the back button?

But that will only help with the current session. I mean the drop arrow in the address bar, it keeps your history for a determined time on FF or IE. It's far quicker to find your most used sites then going into Bookmarks.

You can click the 'History' tab on the menu bar - it's all there. Maybe not quite as neat as your drop-down-address-bar-thingy, but it's the same number of mouse clicks.

[cyberface]

And, at LONG LAST, another important feature for me... reopen last window state. Safari now does this, which OmniWeb did as default, Opera does as default (IIRC), Firefox and Camino needed plugins for, and Safari used to need some filthy hack to do.

Now it's as easy as History menu -> Reopen All Windows From Last Session.

I use a lot of browser windows and a lot of tabs (I've got lots of screen space and plenty of websites I like to read) - at the moment it's 44 windows and 74 tabs, but that's quiet for me. If the browser crashes (yup, Safari isn't immune to this, especially with ing Flash plugins and badly written Java) then it's great not to have to remember where you were - especially if you had meandered off on a random explore. History is always kept, but 74 locations on the menu takes time to re-open...

It's also useful if you like to close the browser down overnight, either because you shut down your computer, or it's flat out processing and you don't want an 'idle' browser leaking RAM and eating CPU cycles because of the Flash plugin, or if you have to reboot your Mac after a kernel patch. I only ever reboot for system updates / patches, and like to have my workspace just as I left it. This feature is very welcome in standard Safari (I was using 'ForgetMeNot' in the 2.x versions).

[cjs]

Gentleman Geoff said:

cjs said:

Leithen said:

cjs said:

I want to give Safari another go and see if I can get to like it. One thing I can't work out. In the Address Bar there is no drop down arrow as per Firefox or IE, can that be added? Quite often I just want to drop down my history and click on a recently visited site, can I do this on Safari?

Click and hold the back button?

But that will only help with the current session. I mean the drop arrow in the address bar, it keeps your history for a determined time on FF or IE. It's far quicker to find your most used sites then going into Bookmarks.

You can click the 'History' tab on the menu bar - it's all there. Maybe not quite as neat as your drop-down-address-bar-thingy, but it's the same number of mouse clicks.

I think that is as near as I am going to get, unfortunately clicking on History does give all recent history so if you been to a site more than once it shows up giving a long list. It's a pity Safari does not have the drop down address list, it's a feature I use a lot on Firefox.

[off_again]

cyberface said:

some great points about Flash and Safari

Yeah, you may be correct. But all I know is that Safari on my iMac is blisteringly quick in comparison to my brand new Dell D630 laptop with Vista installed! In fact, either Firefox or Safari on my Mac is simply years ahead of IE or Firefox on my Windows PC.

Not quite sure why, but I naturally find myself gravitating to the Mac on the basis that its easier to use and flit between webpages, even for work. Which is annoying as I bought the bloody Mac for me, not for my work - my employer isn't paying me to use my own equipment!

[cyberface]

Firefox is the same codebase, so if it's quicker on the Mac then it's likely that the Mac is just simply a faster machine than your PC. Yeah, Windows is a bit more bloated and you may be running a load of anti-spyware software that will slow Windows down, but equally the Mac OS is slowed down itself due to the display engine and the cross platform nature of the OS... Then again, you're talking about Vista which should be much better.

Safari is fast but there's no intrinsic reason why Firefox should be faster on OS X than Windows. I don't like Windows but it's not *that* bad. Unless you're comparing a bloatware windows install with Norton crap etc. with a clean Mac, of course.