Dude, seriously: don’t you wish browser wars were this cool?
Daring Fireball wrote a nice comparison between FF3 and S3, finding Safari to be the better contender. He makes a few good points (I like FF3 better than Safari, but it might just be for ephemeral, weenie reasons like not wanting to use something new) but this sticks out:
Tabs — Firefox 3 does let you drag to reorder tabs within a window, and drag tabs between windows, but it doesn’t let you drag a tab out of a window to create a new window with just that tab. Safari 3 does. Picky-picky, I know, but I use this feature in Safari every day to group related tabs together in their own window.
The rest of his comments are compelling as well: better key shortcuts, built-in dictionary, inline PDF viewing (all for Safari) and a cool robot icon for FF. What would you pick?
While I agree with many of his comments, I find Firefox to be much faster when loading multiple tabs, and I couldn’t live without many of my firefox extensions such as firebug and the google toolbar.
Yeah. I’m kind of stuck with FF as well.
Safari 3.1 the latest WebKit all the way baby!!!
I think Safari is a better browser… hands down. But I use Firefox because I like the 8aweek plug in… So, I dunno who wins then…
Safari is a major security risk! JavaScript can easily rape Safari “over and over and over”. Only unknowing fools use Safari.
FF3 wins in my book for two things:
1. the ability to type say “fire” and see this post come up via my history, which i think is one of the best things to come up since tabs.
2. the one thing that kept safari away from winning last time. The ability to force links into a new tab. I know that you can force it via a terminal command but it’s strange that apple hasn’t truly integrated it in this late.
Otherwise Safari would win because it runs any file format that you can throw at it (and smoothly) and feels great all around so I use it as my secondary browser. Previous to FF3 I didn’t touch FF and only went with camino.
I’m with Dee. I just do not understand why Safari doesn’t let you force links into a new tab without a workaround in Terminal. It happens all the time when I get links in my Gmail. I end up with multiple open windows. Why, Safari, why?
(I do like the sliding effect when you move around tabs in Safari though. Very cool.)
Almost every single feature mentioned both in the comments and the actual story has been functional features of opera for years.
the tabs feature mentioned in the OP is one of the main reasons i just dont get along with firefox. i use this feature of dragging tabs out of the main window constantly, as it is incredibly handy with dual monitors.
@dee as for the indexed search history, opera has been doing that since the last version. forcing links into a new tab is also the standard behaviour. firefox stole this idea from opera.
i find it crazy that even still, firefox doesnt install with a new tab button.. wtf kind of tabbed browser is that.
as for safari… it is the worlds least configurable browser.. sucks ass.
oh and dont get me started on firefox’s lack of built in mouse gestures.
I tried Opera and it doesn’t have the auto-find feature that I spoke of plus the over all design and layout of it doesn’t work for me, which is a shame because it has some cool features. Overall Opera’s plethora of features aren’t implemented “naturally enough” for me. I’d suggest that if you haven’t tried the FF3 beta you should give it a spin because they have greatly improved the overall internet experience IMHO.
http://www.opera.com/products/desktop/next/
See the middle feature at the bottom.
History Search.
Who says that less configurable is a bad thing? For the everyday user that is probably a good thing. For more hardcore users the features of Opera maybe great. However, for most users they won’t even use 90% of the features.
I used to use Safari as my main browser and would happily go back to it. It is quick and does the job. I have just been trying out Firefox 3 recently and it is a much needed improvement over Firefox 2. The only extension I use is Delicious Bookmarks, although there is a similar plug-in for Safari so that is not keeping me on Firefox.
One of the reasons I switched was I watch a lot of YouTube videos and after some heavy surfing found it to get very slow, so I thought I would try out Firefox 3 to see if that copes better under a heavier load. Oh, and it is great to see British English dictionary rather than having to rely on the American one built into OS X. Apple needs to become aware that people in England are different from Americans!!
I don’t know I can’t get into using Safari for Apple, it’s supposed to be a good browser but still I use FF3 and before that I used Camino.