The Blog Of Dysfunction

The old man got me a new comp, E8400 Wolfdale 3.0GHz 6MB L2 Cache 2 GB Ram, 160 GB hard drive, intel DG31PR board etc. In short, its bloody fast. The only bad bit was to find and install all my old software which I had not made backups of. Thanks to a fast Internet connection and a log file of Belrac advisor which told me what my old comp had, I was all set up and ready in a day.

That was just unrelated showing off plus introduction, the matter at hand is that I have just finished test driving Firefox 2.0.0.13 [optimized and customized with updates plugins and add-on's] and the latest Safari 3.1 for Windows. I first used safari last year when they released it as a beta and it was so disappointing that I never took a second look, till now, and boy am I glad I did. The Safari 3 beta of 2007 and the 3.1 of this year are in totally different leagues. Here are the scorecards

This comparison is for the average but aware web user whose main requirements are speed, stability, usability, and customizability.

Speed

Winner : Safari 3.1

Click on the picture for a bigger image

Page loading times were checked after clearing cache, history and cookies. The winner by a narrow margin is safari though image rich sites seem to load fastest in Firefox. In real life, such conditions are not always maintained and loading times are more or less equal with preserved cache and cookies.

Stability

Crashing

Winner: Safari 3.1

My firefox crashed once in its 6 hour long test with 24 tabs open. Safari became sluggish after about 20 tabs but did not experience any crashes.

System Usage

Pictures speak louder than words.

12 tabs open and active

24 tabs open each, both browsers minimized, Foobar playing “Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 23 in a Major, K. 488: Adagio”

Usability

Winner: Firefox

I found both browsers, from installation to customization to be about equally intuitive and user friendly. Keyboard short cuts, drag and drop, privacy, bookmark management are all more or less the same or equal in both browsers. The area in which Firefox has a definite edge over safari is in tabbed browsing management.The safari tab bar does not have the scrolling function that Firefox does and to view a tab after 16 tabs or so needs you to choose from a drop down list. To make it worse, you cannot close this tab easily as the tab is not made visible on the tab bar. Tabs beyond the 16th tab also cannot be dragged to a better position on the tab bar. Also if you are accustomed to the tab close button on the right side as in Firefox, you are inadvertently going to close a lot of tabs in your initial sessions with safari because its close button is on the left end of the tab.

Customizability

Winner: Firefox. Duh!!

Safari has, so to say, zero customizability, as all good add-on’s are terribly costly and most don’t work in windows. I cant even add a security plugin. In case you are un initiated, Firefox is the mother father and end of all customizable browsers. there is very little you cant get it to do with add-ons and scripts and I would, honest to God, be rather lost without its addons.

How did we manage before the advent of add-ons, I wonder.

Summary

What browser is best, is a question best answered based on the background and needs of the user as there is no “one size fits all” in the browser world. Are you a beginner,? just want tabbed browsing with speed and would much rather work with something right out of box, then safari 3.1 is a really good choice. On the other hand if you are a blogger, an above average Internet user and cannot bear the thought of life without customizability, Firefox is your shining knight on a mighty steed. If you are one of my girl-friends who just wants to check email and Orkut, use IE7, saves me the headache of downloading and installing a completely unappreciated software. If you are a mac user, you are stuck with safari and you shouldn’t be reading this anyway.

Me? If it isn’t obvious,

I LOVE FIREFOX

But I still use safari when I am not in my power user mode.

Ciao

Schizo

Technorati Tags: Firefox 2,safari 3.1,browser comparison

This entry was posted on Monday, April 14th, 2008 at 3:07 pm and is filed under Technology, Words Of Wisdom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.