Quick Comparison: Three Browsers On Os X Camino, Safari, and Firefox

[evought 0]

I am once again trying to decide what to use as my main browser on OS X. I use a number of browsers on a regular basis to test web pages, but use Safari as my default browser. Lately, I have been exploring other options. This time, I will talk about Camino, Safari, and Firefox. Later I will probably post about OmniWeb and Opera.There were several reasons I stuck with Safari as my default browser. The first was that it came with the OS and was well-integrated. At the time, Camino seemed unsable/unfinished and Firefox had a problem with my ISP which caused it to crash. Opera's ads annoyed me and OmniWeb was still very new.Safari is a good, all-around browser. It has tab support, RSS, and is reasonably fast. In short, all the basics you need. It is built on the same rendering engine as KDE's built-in browser which I use on Linux. Its biggest advantage to me is its Keychain support--- it saves and accesses passwords in the Mac OS X pasword manager. The password manager, which is loaded with dozens of randomly-generated passwords, is easy to back up, and all passwords are maintained in one place.There are several problems with Safari. The first is that it does not work well on a number of form-heavy sites, mainly governement-related, but also WYSIWYG editors like TinyMCE. With sites that use TinyMCE, like Joomla-powered CMSes, the posts are never saved. This means I must use Firefox or Camino on a regular basis to access these sites. The second problem is with the Keychain integration. I like to keep multiple keychains to organize my passwords. For instance, I have a separate keychain for my craft business. Safari does not search these keychains for site passwords, even when unlocked, and does not prompt where to save passwords. Therefore, I end up with all of my website passwords in my login keychain.Safari is Apple Scriptable, and, in theory, extensible, but I have not yet found a collection of plugins nor explored the scripting possibilities.Camino also supports the keychain. It appears to access passwords in secondary keychains, but only saves to the login keychain without prompting. Camino is based on the Gecko engine that Firefox also uses. Its rendering seems a touch slower than Safari, at least on the pages I use, but is still quite fast. It also supports form-heavy sites much better. Other than that, Camino has little to recommend it. It has tabs, decent bookmark management, and other necessities, but is feature poor and has no extension mechanism that I can find. Camino's memory and disk footprint is quite big.Firefox, also based on the Gecko engine. It is the slowest loading and rendering of the three, but is still quite reasonable, especially if I leave it open on my desktop. Its memory/disk footprint is in between Safari and Camino, but I have enough RAM that it does not matter much. Firefox, like Camino, supports form-laden sites very well. It has built in RSS support, but its biggest advantage is extensibility. I have replaced the built-in RSS support with the Sage newsreader plugin, for instance, and installed ColorTabs to make tabs easier to see and recognize. Firefox is also skinable and therefore I can select the look and feel I want to have.Firefox has a number of plugins for web developers, supports XML well, and shows quite a bit of information about web pages. One quirk is that you cannot cut and past from the Page Info table. When doing web citations in papers, for instance, one cannot cut and paste the author or title fields.Firefox no longer seems to lock up with my ISP, removing one of its major obstacles for me.Firefox's biggest disadvantage is also its strongest advantage on other platforms--- password management. It does not support the keychain in any fashion. The password management has a plugin interface, but as far as I can tell, no one has ever written an extension for it. There is a post in the wicki about fixing this in a later version, but for now, I must maintain a second and redundant password store.At the moment, I will probably stick with Safari. I will explore recent versions of OmniWeb and Opera next.

[penguinwings 0]

[i'm a newbie, so I hope I'm doing this right]Thanks, that's really informative ... I've looked into other browsers, but I just can't get them to stick.I've stuck with Safari, just because it works fine [usually] and I'm too lazy to learn new keyboard shortcuts :Pand it's shiiiiiiiny .... if you use Shapeshifter .. Safari ends up looking the best when reskinned. [i'm a graphical person x_x]... but when I need to look more at their code or pick apart sites that aren't working, I use IE (heh, old school), because that naturally messes things up.I guess I just never got used to the way other browsers work and don't have the time to :DI've always had a hard time finding a Mac browser that would handle all the CSS that gets thrown at it. Namely, colored scrollbars. Those things are boring to CSS.