reesesWeb

Bloody hell I'm sick of web browsers. I've been using the damned things for eleven or twelve years, and they still stink.

I've been using Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox since at least 2002, and I've been reasonably happy with it. However, when Tiger came out with Safari 2.0, I switched, and I made a real effort to make it stick.

I've been playing with WebKit, trying to get a better, faster, more stable Safari, and for the most part it's ok. Occasionally, I'll get a dud build, but that's the problem fo snarfing from CVS. They don't really have nightly builds going yet, and it's too much for my lazy ass to manage them on my side. That said, Safari is brittle. With PithHelmet and Saft installed, I can easily knock it into a cocked hat, requiring a restart. I have to restart Safari an average of once every two or three days.

Anyway, my three month experiment may be at an end. As such, I have compiled a few notes, regarding positive and negative opinions about each browser. The list of "Bad" for Firefox is really long, but I'm really getting sick of the Safari instability with my usage pattern.

Safari

Good

• RSS autodiscovery
• Mac integration
• Multithreaded operation

Bad

• PithHelmet is no match for adblock.
• The middle mouse button works, and opens links in a new tab.
• Slower in general than Firefox, even with the WebKit interims.
• Favicons never update once retrieved. They're cached permanently, and need to be deleted to refresh.

Firefox

Good

• Greasemonkey. 'Nuff said.
• Firefox is basically the same everywhere, like emacs. The only differences are plugins and configuration.
• Timed refreshes with Tab Extensions. These are great for webmail and ETrade.
• Better page search, with a box at the bottom rather than a dialog. The inline search works with that box, rather than a completely different mode.

Bad

• The app is "basically" single threaded. I have a bookmarks bar folder for blogs, so I can read them in the original page context, complete with sidebars, clever design, whatever. Opening them in Safari, I can start reading right away. With Firefox, I can't use the application at all for at least a minute, usually longer.
• The middle button isn't recognised on the Mac. This is due to the default Firefox builds using the wrong input manager. Some nightly builds support this, but I don't like messing with them.
• Firefox "forgets" authentication cookies after a couple weeks. This is probably by design, but it's still annoying to have to log into Slashdot or whatever, just because Firefox thinks it's more secure.
• Firefox leaks memory like mad. I have to restart it at least once a week because it's slurping up half a gig of resident memory.
• It doesn't obey the Mac OS system proxy profile. It has its own version, and I have to switch it when I go between clients, hotels, and home.
• There's no "list of extra tabs" if the number of tabs is too big for the tab bar. With Safari, I can access excessive tabs without enlarging the window or deleting tabs.
• The tab close button is on the far right, not on the tab itself. This is a preference issue, but I think it's dopey that if I'm browsing through a bunch of open tabs, I have to move the mouse all over the window if I'm selecting which ones to close.

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