To Safari or not to Safari?

One OSX application I’m starting to have a love-hate relationship with is Safari. I like Safari’s speed and I like it’s integration to the OS. Here are some things I don’t like:

• For some reason, I like to move my mouse over the link and look at the bottom of the window where that link goes. A weird habit, I know. But it prevents some anguish when Bloglines
  doesn’t render a link correctly.
• Bad ad blocking. There are probably better ways to do this. Saft does a good job, but sites like Omaha.com and IMDB have pop-ups and moving ad thingies galore. Highly annoying, yet these are sites that I like and/or need to go to sometimes. Safari/Saft doesn’t quite do everything that I need it to.
• I’m spoiled by extensions, especially GreaseMonkey and AdBlock. I could get very used to Scrapbook as well.

With those things in mind, I spent some time with other browsers:

FireFox

I downloaded FireFox early on. Though all the things above would work, the browser itself was slow. Quite slow. I think it wasn’t a Universal Binary, so it had to run through Rosetta. I’m not offended by that, but that doesn’t help performance. And using XUL probably didn’t help either. Maybe I should try this one again.

OmniWeb

Ironically, I remember using the OmniWeb browser on NeXTStep oh so many years ago, but this is not an outdated browser! This is what I liked:

• Tabbing brought to a whole new level. You really have to see it to understand it.(Movie link)
• You can setup preferences per site. Need pop-ups on one site? Turn them on and you don’t have to worry out it again.
• Great built-in ad blocking.
• Workspaces — save all the sites you are currently on to a workspace, and then you can go back to them at your convenience.
• Though I didn’t try them, you can write AppleScripts for it. Sorta like FireFox extensions, I think.

What I didn’t like:

• There isn’t a Universal Binary version yet, so it was running through Rosetta. I didn’t think performance was going to be a problem, but it was. They are going to make a Universal Binary version in 5.5.
• Some of the sites where I have an account wouldn’t log in, even though I had the correct username and password. Safari worked fine.
• It crashed a few times. The first OSX app that I’ve run that did that.
• The $29.95 price tag. Yep, I’m cheap.

I think middle two issues stem from using Rosetta. The features almost outweigh all of them — except the performance. Well, and the crashing. Maybe worth another look when 5.5 is out. Yep, I know there is a public beta, but I’m going to wait for
the real thing.

Update I’ve tried Omniweb 5.5beta2, and and I like it

Camino

Camino uses Mozilla’s Gecko engine running but uses the Mac widgets for the GUI. It has a Universal Binary, so things ran well.

The pros:

• Fast, very fast. At least as fast as Safari.
• CamiTools is a plugin that adds a GUI to some advanced options. Very, very nice stuff in here.
• Good ad-blocking, especially with CamiTools.

The Cons:

• Still no extensions, though GreaseMonkey will be embedded someday.
• Okay, really only one con. But extensions are big with me. But it doesn’t have another big WOW! with it.

Opera

Yes, there is Opera on OSX. I’ve only used Opera for small amounts of time, and it was with older versions on Linux. To make this overview fair, I decided to download it and try it out. I was impressed, to say the least.

Opera has always had a different philosophy of web browsing, but their tabbed browser, sessions, etc. now seems to be normal.

Pros:

• Quite fast. Maybe a little slower than Safari and Caminio, but certainly faster than OmniWeb and FireFox and very usable.
• I liked the buttons that show up when you are in the address area. It seems intuitive and it clutters your windows a little less.
• A new tab button straight on the browser.
• Remembers your browser sessions from one page to another.
• Wonderful built-in ad blocking.
• No extensions per se, but you can make User JavaScripts. There is a somewhat active community making them. They even say that Opera can run basic Greasemonkey scripts, though I haven’t tried it yet.

Cons:

• No address display on the bottom when hovering over a link. This may seem like a minor nit to you, but it gets annoying to me. This JavaScript seems to do what I need, and even more.
• Scrolling up with my mouse doesn’t seem to work very well. This is a high-annoyance factor for me.
• It mysteriously crashed on me. I just installed some third-party buttons, so maybe that’s why. I restarted and reinstalled the buttons and now has been fine for a while.
• Can’t view YouTube videos posted in a blog. Yet it works find from YouTubes site.

The Verdict

I could and should see if FireFox is a Universal Binary, but I may not — I’m still going to have speed issues just because it uses XUL. But that XUL is what gives extensions a chance.

I’ll probably end up trying to use OmniWeb when 5.5 comes out so it can have a fair comparison. I want OmniWeb to work and work well. But it’s going to have to be really, really good for me to shell out $30 for a browser now days.

Camino was good, speed-wise, but it didn’t offer me much else.

Opera, on the other hand, is fast, has JavaScript hacking, and has much usability add in. Surprisingly to say, I’m turning into an Opera fan — I’m going to be using it for a while.