Safari 4
Posted on September 14, 2009 at 20:03
I just switched from Firefox to Safari 4 on my MacBook. Here is why.
By Apple, for Apple
This is one of the main reasons of my switch. Safari is especially designed for Mac OS X what makes it better to use on it. With Firefox I used to miss the spotlight search, with Safari I can now see my history and bookmarks in the search results. This is not the only thing, now I can sync my bookmarks with my iPod Touch. I know there are workarounds for this so it would work with Firefox too, but I am a person who likes it clean, I don't want to mess around with things so other things could work.
Speed
A lot of tests have proved that Safari 4 is the fastest browser available today. As a normal user you won't notice this. But when you start messing around with Google Wave Sandbox you notice a big difference in speed. Google Wave used to be really slow on Firefox while it on Safari significantly faster is.
Compatibility
Acid3 has proven that Safari 4 is ready for the next web standards while Firefox is almost.
Downsides
Yes, there are of course some downsides, and I am not going to lie about it, I really miss some features in Firefox. The first thing I really miss are the addons, this is a huge weakness of Apple, they don't like people to mess around with their creations. The second feature was the open source. I really love open source, the ability to really help when there is a problem is amazing. But it also makes it safer, because when you publish code you just can't leave a security leak untouched and hope that no one sees it.
If you think I am totally wrong or just have an other opinion feel free to leave a comment.
Comments
Laurent said:
@chewit
Those are no lies, these are facts. You chose for firefox because you are a Linux and OSS fanboy. I recently chose to switch to Safari 4. Maybe because my Apple fanboy feelings told me to do so, but I did my best to choose for productivity and usability. But I respect your choice.
Oliver said:
Well, personally I don't think there's any need for those "Google Wave" and other stuff. When they want to do a collaboration of different services they can use a (portable) program. Which is faster and uses less bandwith then XMLHttpRequest/Flash/Java/whatever stuff. And additionally I don't want a company to know really EVERYTHING about me, my friends, my family, what I do and so on. Google is a company which makes money by selling information to others, so you can be sure there's not that much privacy there.
And everything it offers is available by other services. So I don't see any sense for those program-like webpages :) The last thing I think the web really needs is something like WolframAlpha. A giant highly-indexed catalogue of the web which can solve questions by combining information from different pages and so gives you a direct answer or the best possible place to find it. THAT is really innovative.
I would also use Opera instead of FF now, but I don't wanna lose the addon system, which is more important than 0.5 seconds per page load.
Chewit said:
All lies, Firefox is the best!