Firefox 3 and Safari 3 on the Mac
As a web designer and all around webphile I spend quite a bit of time in a broad range of web browsers—surfing, testing, reading. Of course this frequent use of browsers allows me to become quite familiar with their user interfaces and with that their small user interface inconveniences are multiplied into infuriating annoyances. John Gruber recently did a rundown of Firefox 3 vs. Safari 3, which I more or less agree with. However, I have a few annoyances with Firefox, which I’d like to add and some annoyances with Safari I’d like to throw out there as well.
Firefox 3
- I have found Firefox 3 to be rather unstable. I realize that this is beta software, which will of course have bugs. However, I don’t expect beta software to crash while running in the background. There have been times where I have been chatting on iChat and am suddenly presented with Firefox’s oops!-please-report-this-crash dialog box.
- The startup time is atrocious. On my 2.2 Ghz, 2GB RAM MacBook Pro it takes a good 15 – 20 seconds for Firefox to start up and ask me if I want a new session or continue my old session.
- Recently the back button changed1. The previous behavior was single-click takes you to the previous page, click and hold presented a drop-down list of the last ten pages or so. Now single-click presents the drop-down list, giving the user no interface element for quickly going back one page in one click, which is exactly what I want to do a good 95% of the time.
Safari 3
- Tabs don’t display the favicons like they do in Firefox. Some may say this is nit-picky, but I would firmly disagree. It is much easier to scan for an icon than to read the page titles on the tabs. This is one of the fundamental concepts behind the desktop metaphor interface.
- Safari doesn’t restore or prompt you to restore your previous session by default. Instead you have to go into the History item on the menu bar and select “Reopen All Windows From Last Session”
- There is no syntax highlighting on View Source. This, combined with a lack of extensions (Firefox’s big plus) and, as a result, lack of developer tools, makes developing on Safari a horrible experience.
On a Windows machine the choice seems pretty clear to me. In my opinion, Firefox is simply the way to go. However, on the Mac the choice is a bit harder to make and it seems to come down to which browser’s inconveniences, when magnified into large irritations, can you deal with better? For me, the slow startup time and the semi-frequent crashing were annoying, but it was the Firefox back button was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I simply could not deal with the back button producing an undesired behavior 95% of the time. However, what I find exciting is that browsers on the Mac are making vast improvements and with any new release I could be swayed to change my default browser.
1 I realize that there is probably a setting in about:config that can revert Firefox back to its previous behavior, but I don’t think the unintuitive behavior should be the default behavior or be hard to change.
May 06, 2008