Mumbling Again

Safari vs. Firefox

I've been teeter-tottering back and forth between Safari and Firefox. I'm recently back to Safari since I broke down and bought Saft for the ad blocking ability. By the way, the Panther version doesn't block ads—I already made that mistake. Over all I love Saft now and it was worth every penny. Plus I like to support small Mac developers who fill a much needed niche.

Now that I have the same capabilities of the Firefox Ad Block plugin inside Safari, I realize that there are so many shortcomings in the OS X version of Firefox. My biggest complaints are a lack of Cocoa functionality like built in spell check and GUI inconsistencies in the form buttons and inputs. Having the Cocoa spell checking in textarea fields is really helpful especially when editing webmail or creating blog posts. Plus its great to have an operating system level spell check because your user dictionary spans across multiple applications. Now only if Bare Bones would re-write BBEdit in Cocoa instead of Carbon.

Also Brad Rice is right about the sheer speed of Safari. It launches much faster than Firefox. This hardly seems like a fair fight though when you consider that the Apple Web Kit framework is probably already running in OS X and Firefox has to load all the libraries to render a website from a standstill.

However, there is one area of performance where Safari falls painfully short of Firefox. When rendering a large (100k+) page of complex table structure, Safari really chokes. Unfortunately, there are some really poorly designed web applications that cause this exact problem which I'm required to use in my daily workflow. I guess I'll stick to Firefox for these few cases.

The good news is that rumor has it Firefox 2.0 will support more OS X native functions like native form GUI elements. I'll keep my fingers crossed for Cocoa spelling too.