sunrise and iCab are still very young browsers and lack the features of most of the browsers mentioned in the article.

However, if I’m doing research or opening a ton of tabs and would be devistated if my browser crashed, I use Opera for its session recovery feature. Yeah I could use Omniweb and save my workspaces, but I really don’t like the tumbnailed tabs. I’d use it if it had a regular non-thumbnailed tab bar option though like Shiira 2.0b1.

My old iMac G3 is a different story though. It’s only a 333mhz with 128mb of RAM and I’ve found an optimized version of Camino for G3 processors that works the best. It may not utilize OSX’s inline spell checker (by far my biggest complaint and yes I know some of the nightlies do), but it gets the job done for simple browsing.

On every other OS I use Opera 100%. Gotsta love the browser options for OSX.

When I was a PC user I primarily used FireFox, for which I only snagged a couple plugins: Flashblock being the main one I’m missing from Safari. The other plugins I grabbed for FF were to do things Safari does by default, like open external links in a new tab and force new window links to open in a tab instead. There are a plethora of plugins available for firefox nowadays, but it seems to me that they just slow the app down if not crash it.

I’m not anti-plugin, I just haven’t seen any that actually help me do work or enjoy the web more.

As mentionned above, iCab is missing from that review, but it’s still beta and quite slow (developer says somewhere that this is due to debug code) on sites making a heavy use of CSS2, but I think it’s the more W3C compliant of all, the one that has the most extensive preferences, and like Safari, the only Mac-only browser … All the others have a cross-platform rendering engine (although Safari could be said to use the khtml linux rendering engine, but I don’t think they could be re-united).

As a web developper, I also have been testing a lot of browser, but I have to admit I always come back to Camino because it’s the only browser that I can use everyday without switching with another for doing a specific task.

Yes Opera (tested on PC and Mac up to 9, user since v3) is super-fast, has very interesting features, but it also has random problems with the Plesk Web hosting interface (used by many web host). And also not that many people are using it (PC Mac) so it’s not my primary choice for web-developping (although one may say that if your design works in Opera, it usually works everywhere). Also, and even though you may disable it, Opera can do RSS and Mail, and I prefer soft doing only one task (even Mozilla broke into Firefox Thunderbird, why does Opera go the other way is beyond me).

Safari also has random problems with Plesk, and also some problems with the way it handles SSL certificates (even though certificates are stored in keychain, Safari does not seem to be able to choose between 2 different personal certificate for a same web address like if you want 2 different user filling their income tax on the same machine).

Firefox is still a little buggy, but I use it with the WebDevelopper extension, a must ! Look and feel not that great, especially checkboxes, form fields, etc …

I tested/used the others, but for me, the important point is the rendering engine more than the additionnal features, so … I stick with Camino for the time being.

Also I think it’s funny, people going for Camino because is lean, and after that looking for plug-ins and extensions … same for Firefox, with plug-ins thay are re-constructing the full Mozilla/Netscape suite they said was to bloated …

Cheers,

Will Pate
Community Ambassador, Flock

The main ones I use are Camino, Firefox, Safari, and Flock, in that order. The biggest pain of switching browsers has been keeping my passwords synchronized between them. I got tired of being forced to remember which browser had my password for a particular site, so I wrote my own Password Manager that uses the keychain and provides extensions for these 4 browsers.

I have heard good things about OmniWeb and Shiira, so I’ll be adding support for them soon. I wish I could support Opera as well, but their extension mechanism is severely limited (AFAIK).

Cheers!
Dave Teare
Co-author of 1Passwd: Password Manager for Mac

@Dan

I think this was a OS X rendering bug and it has been fixed with the latest OS X update. Have a look at that page: http://hivelogic.com/articles/2006/06/28/mac_os_x_10_4_7

I was a Camino for quite some time until a few Firefox extensions caught my attention.

Flock has really caught my attention due to its Flickr integration and ease of inserting photos into just about anything. Admittedly, Flock was overwhleming at first when I first tried it 9 months ago and as the article says, come with Web 2.0 eyes and you’ll set aside the growing pains and see the future as the integrations get worked out!

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/bonecho/all-beta.html

In fact, a similarly ignorant person would say the same thing about Camino… that it has no extensions and no plugins. It does, but they’re even fewer than what’s available for Safari. Just because there aren’t as many as for Firefox or IE doesn’t mean there are none. (Someone else already mentioned Pimp My Safari website, but there’s also Pimp My Camino: http://www.pimpmycamino.com/)

And then to leave out Opera, which is the fastest browser available for the Mac, is just inexcusable.

Finally, it’s an obvious comparison, but a misleading one, to say that Safari is to OS X as IE is to Windows. Yes, Safari is the default OS X browser now, but unlike IE, it’s also one of the very best on that platform, whereas IE at this point is about the worst.

If you’re interested in a more factual review of the major Mac OS X browsers, check out the one I did last month: http://www.musingsfrommars.org/2006/05/all-the-lovely-browsers.html

Leland