Battle of the Browsers
- September 20, 2005
- 6 comments
In the last couple of days, there’s been a few announcements from a couple browsers for the Mac. The first was that Camino is nearing official 1.0 status. There’s an alpha version you can download now which seems very stable and looks quite nice. And today, the news is the latest version of Opera is now free. I guess Opera decided they’d try their hand at giving away their browser instead of selling it. It makes sense since the other major browsers are free too. They also bumped the latest version to 8.5. I took these two and compared them to my current default browser, Apple’s Safari.
In terms of user interface, all three are decent. All three have tabbed browsing and decent bookmark managers. For default configuration and looks, Camino is the best, but with a little tweaking both Opera and Safari can look quite nice. You might’ve noticed that Opera and Safari don’t have their default looks in my screenshot above. For Opera, I’ve downloaded some extra skins that give it a more standard Aqua interface. I’ve also heavily customized the toolbars and buttons. For Safari, I used Unify Safari to give it the nice, new unified look in Tiger. Even after these interface tweaks, none of the browsers has the “perfect” UI. If I could get the Camino icons onto the unified Safari look, I’d be one happy man.
The UI is only one part of what makes a browser fun to use. Another important part is performance. How does the browser display the page? Does it support Web standards? How quick does it load the pages? All three browsers have excellent standards support, light years better than IE. All of them render pages quite well, without too much variation. When it comes to text display, Safari renders words and letters the clearest, even at small sizes. Camino had the most trouble with small, underlined text sometimes making it nearly unreadable. To compare download speeds, I conducted a very unscientific test where I downloaded the MacUpdate site several times with each browser and averaged the download times out. Safari and Opera both came in at under 6.5 seconds, with Safari being slightly quicker. Camino averaged around 8 seconds.
The last part of what makes a good browser great are add-ons, skins, plugins, etc. Firefox (which I haven’t included in this comparison) wins this part hands down, but out of the three I tested, Opera wins. While all three have extras that will add or enhance existing features, I think my favorite extra would be Sogudi for Safari. It allows you to use the address bar for quick searches of various sites, all of which are customizable. I find myself using it all the time with Safari.
All three browsers are worth checking out. I will keep all three on my computer, mainly for testing my Web designs, but I will be sticking with Safari as my default for while longer.
I’m sure some people will wonder why I didn’t include Firefox in this comparison. My main reason is that Firefox always seems to bog down, and sometimes lock up on pages with heavy Flash content. It also has the worst bookmark manager of the bunch. It’s a nice browser, but the other three are better in my opinion. I also didn’t include OmniWeb because even though it’s got some very nice features, it’s not free and is slow.
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Matt S
September 28, 2005
I agree completely with this article. I’ve tried browsers like camino, shira, firefox, opera, and many others and all their beta versions etc. My favorite is still safari. It’s hard to beat safari because of its nice bookmarking capabilities and sleek design; not to mention speed.
I can’t wait to see an update for safari in mac’s new operating system os 11. I’m presuming that there will be an update. Does anyone know for sure??
Matt
Matt S
October 19, 2005
Does anyone know if there is a way to completely emulate ie6 browser in a mac? The reason I’m asking is because I do online college for graphic design and their site is configured for ie6 only. It’s so frustrating…
I’ve used the debug menu in safari and it helps but it still doesn’t enable full functionality.
I’ve also used virtual pc and it obviously works but I hate using it because it is sooooooooo slow.
Any opinions?
Thanks
Matt
Safari has grown up to be a very nice browser. Mac users were kind of in limbo there for a while, when we had to carefully weigh out our browser options from week to week. IE was (and is) worthless, while Netscape was a slow dog, and many of the lesser known browsers (although some good ones) were still in their infancy. Safari seemed like a gift from the Gods, when it was first announced, then we learned that we would basically be using a “work in progress”, much longer than we would have liked. Safari has now matured enough, so that even the simple website layouts that I create and test in Safari, will look good for the most part in most browsers being used on Macs and PCs.
It can only get better from here.