I used the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark, which showed me that Firefox 3 bests today's Safari by a small amount of time. So what's faster about Firefox 3.0? To find out, I ran Firefox 2.0, Firefox 2.0.0.14, Firefox 3.0 and Safari 3.1.1 through a battery of objective tests. If Firefox 3.0 had been available when I switched to the Mac, things might have turned out differently.įirefox 3 for the Mac has literally come up to speed. The performance difference is apparent - especially on pages that use complex JavaScript. Even Safari stalwarts, such as Computerworld's Mac editor, Ken Mingis, readily agree on that point. Firefox 3.0 is noticeably faster than earlier versions. Mozilla's latest release of Firefox puts a whole new spin on the Mac browser discussion. All have good points, but each also has glaring problems that rules it out of contention: Camino's lack of extensions and older Gecko engine, Opera's quirky interface and OmniWeb's lack of modern tabs. There are other Mac options, such as Camino, Opera and OmniWeb. But in the end, it was Safari's excellent overall performance that decided me. The best way to describe Safari is Spartan. Initially, I did have a hard time warming up to Safari's squared-off, drab gray look. In my personal experience, Firefox 2.0 was faster in OS X 10.5 "Leopard," but not by enough to significantly attract my attention.īy comparison, Safari launches very quickly, and its WebKit open-source Web-page rendering engine loads most pages in lickety-split fashion.
FIREFOX 3 FOR MAC MAC OS X
Firefox 2 on the Mac OS X 10.4 loaded slowly, especially the first time you launched it after starting up the Mac. But it's an example of a lack of Mac integration that I miss in Firefox.īy far the bigger deal with earlier versions of Firefox concerned performance. As a cross-platform product, that's not surprising or terribly wrong. Firefox, however, treats the green button as a Windows-style maximize button, so it always expands the browser to your entire screen. Here's an example: Clicking on the "green + window" button in Safari makes Apple Inc.'s browser expand to fit the width of the currently-loaded Web page - a neat trick because in most cases, you don't need the page to be wider than that you just want to be able to see the whole page.
Among the annoyances is Firefox's more Windows-centric way of doing things - it doesn't closely adhere to Apple's user-interface principles (which admittedly aren't all that well understood or followed by many native Mac applications). Safari has been the better browser on the Macintosh for a number of reasons.
FIREFOX 3 FOR MAC FOR MAC OS
Now that Firefox 3.0 is out, though, is it finally the better choice for Mac OS X? But after trying Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 for the Mac, I adopted Apple's Safari - and haven't looked back. As a confirmed Firefox user, I expected Mozilla's Mac browser to be a no-brainer.
FIREFOX 3 FOR MAC PC
When I switched from a Windows PC to a Mac in the fall of 2006, I was very disappointed in my choice of Web browsers.
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