Friday, September 23, 2005

Macworld Browser Review

Josh Aas (Firefox developer):

Secondly, Macworld put Firefox 1.0.6 ahead of Safari, which is almost as ridiculous as putting Camino behind Opera. See, I’m not biased towards Mozilla browsers! Safari 2.0 is simply a better browser than Firefox 1.0.6. Its [sic] not even close. The story is a little different with Firefox 1.5b1, but that isn’t what they are reviewing.

I agree that the Macworld rankings are odd. I think I would order them Safari, OmniWeb, Camino, Firefox, Opera. I couldn’t care less about Firefox themes or extensions, and I deduct huge numbers of points from it and Opera because they don’t look or feel like Mac apps.

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I totally agree that Safari comes in first and everything else comes in some debatable order of last.

BUT in my opinion Firefox's saving grace is that some of the extensions make it a truly awesome web development/debugging tool. If you haven't checked out for instance the "Web Developer" plugin, it's worth keeping Firefox around for.

Thanks. I hadn't heard of the Web Developer extension. It sounds cool--much more interesting than controlling iTunes from a little icon at the bottom of the browser window.

Two especially excitings features of the Web Developer extension:

1. Live editing of CSS. Select "Edit CSS" from the CSS button-bar menu. Now as you edit any of the style sheets, you see the results update live.

2. The "Outline Elements" features in the "Outline" button-bar menu. It will cause a frame to be drawn around any specificed elements on the page. Great for debugging subtle placement issues (without adding "border=1" or whatever around various items).

quote=Daniel Jalcut
"If you haven't checked out for instance the "Web Developer" plugin, it's worth keeping Firefox around for."
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You just made the same error as the Macworld journalist.
"Web Developer" is an extension, not a plugin! Please learn the difference... Grrr

For me, Firefox is the best browser on the Mac. I like it for a number of reasons, but one that stands out most for me is that it provides a fairly consistant interface across platforms (For example, I use FF on my Mac at home and I use FF on my computer at work).

That said, I do like Safari.

i have not been impressed with firefox on my mac..(loved it on my PC when i had one).
i like camino, shiira, safari...i guess i need to try omniweb. tried opera and didn't like it.

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