I use Safari 2.0 on Tiger and used 1.0-1.2 on Panther. Through all that time, I've tried other browsers - most notably Camino and Firefox - and I've always come back to Safari. Here are my observations:
Safari uses the native OS X controls, Firefox doesn't. This wouldn't irk me so much if the rest of the system weren't so beautiful. I agree with you that consistent UI is important.
Firefox has incremental search, Safari doesn't. This is, quite frankly, the biggest pull to Firefox for me. I love incremental search, and Safari pisses me off every time I look for something in a page.
Safari's inability to search anything but Google is not important as I use Quicksilver for web searches.
Firefox is awesome for web development, and I use it for that on my PowerBook and at work on Windows. The Windows version of Firefox is excellent. Besides the DOM inspector (which I never actually use), Firefox has a Developer toolbar and a JavaScript debugger (both available as extensions) that make it so soso much nicer to debug problems with than anything else out there that I know of.
That said, each browser has its uses, and Firefox does have some distance yet to travel if it wants to supplant Safari as my day-to-day browser as well as my development browser.
by Brian Donovan — Jun 17
Safari uses the native OS X controls, Firefox doesn't. This wouldn't irk me so much if the rest of the system weren't so beautiful. I agree with you that consistent UI is important.
Firefox has incremental search, Safari doesn't. This is, quite frankly, the biggest pull to Firefox for me. I love incremental search, and Safari pisses me off every time I look for something in a page.
Safari's inability to search anything but Google is not important as I use Quicksilver for web searches.
Firefox is awesome for web development, and I use it for that on my PowerBook and at work on Windows. The Windows version of Firefox is excellent. Besides the DOM inspector (which I never actually use), Firefox has a Developer toolbar and a JavaScript debugger (both available as extensions) that make it so so so much nicer to debug problems with than anything else out there that I know of.
That said, each browser has its uses, and Firefox does have some distance yet to travel if it wants to supplant Safari as my day-to-day browser as well as my development browser.