Is it time to ditch Safari?
Apple is very good at making streamlined simple-to-use-software. There are many Apple products that are among my favorites - iCal, Pages, Keynote, GarageBand to name a few. One notable exception is Safari. Apple - I’ve had enough of Safari, okay? I’m ditching it.
What’s wrong with Safari?
Truth is, I only have one complaint about Safari. Problem is, that one complaint I’m fed up with. It gives me too many spinning beachballs. When I’ve had many pages open, sometimes it has quite literally taken 5 minutes to switch to Safari. Yes, I have timed it. I’ve even made a cup of coffee - including boiling the kettle - while I’ve waited. Sometimes Safari will chug away in the background sucking 20% CPU for no apparent reason. I know beachballs might belong on a surfing safari, but there’s no place for them web surfing on Safari.
What are the options
I didn’t have my whole life to compare browsers and options, so have just selected the two major free alternatives - Firefox and Opera. Yes, if you haven’t heard, Opera is now free. The big four in browsers for OS X are Safari, Firefox, Opera and Omniweb and on Version Tracker have the following ratings (out of 5):
- Safari 4.0 (all time)
- Firefox 3.9 (all time)
- Opera 4.3 (current version as previous versions had lower rating due to not being free)
- Omniweb 3.95 (without price rating)
I am aware there are others (eg Camino, Shiira, iCab) but having reviewed the comments by users on Version Tracker, it appeared they had some key issues with rendering and speed. But keep your eye on them, because they do show a lot of promise.
Through experiencing not too dissimilar problems with my news aggregator, NetNewsWire, when having many pages open in it, I have concluded the performance problem is something to do with Apple’s WebKit which is what Safari and NetNewsWire use. So that also ruled Shiira out. With OmniWeb costing money and having also read the comments on Version Tracker about it, I wasn’t convinced it presented any compelling reason to pay money for a browser, so haven’t considered it either.
Firefox
I had been using Firefox for sometime with one particular banking site that doesn’t like Safari, and also for analysing web pages using its Web Developer toolkit extension. Extensions not surprisingly (given Firefox being Open Source), are its greatest advantage.
On the down side with more intense usage I found it somewhat unstable, with two severe crashes, one which caused an exceptionally rare Windows style domino hang. That is, where one application hangs and even though you Force Quit it, others start to follow, including the Finder until the only option is a cold reset (hold the power button in until the computer turns off). At that point I ditched Firefox as a viable alternative.
Another big problem is it doesn’t import Safari bookmarks - I couldn’t even find an Extension to do that. This should be a mandatory feature as the biggest pain in switching browsers is re-creating bookmarks.
Opera
Opera has been around for many years and has developed a good reputation but was always let down by being adware (although you could pay for an ad-free version). Fortunately the folks who make Opera have finally relented and it is now available at no cost.
Some niceties of Opera quickly became apparent. Some I liked are being able to import Safari’s bookmarks; the Window menu shows all open pages in all browser windows (unlike Safari which just shows the current one in each open browser window); tabs can be re-ordered via drag and drop; and on starting, you can have Opera re-open all the pages you previously had open.
Opera’s ability to remember what pages you had open (which NetNewsWire also does) is an excellent feature. After the cold reset mentioned earlier, on restarting Opera, up came the 29 pages I had open. Very, very appreciated.
Things I didn’t like are it’s difficult to get news feeds to be added to a third party news aggregator; some key sequences are different to Safari such as Command-N to open a new tab rather than Safari’s Command-T (which Firefox also utilizes); and occasionally page loading stall near the end.
Opera has at times been using 4 to 10% CPU for no apparent reason but unlike Safari, this has not impacted system performance, and there’s been no beachballs. Considering this anomaly, the likely reason is that when Safari is problematic, it is doing considerable paging to the hard disk.
But the biggest problem I’ve encountered with Opera is sometimes it does not redraw the browser window when you are scrolling. Restarting it clears the problem but it does return in time. (Yet again I appreciated Opera remembering which pages I had open) Without this problem, Opera would have been my favorite browser by a wide margin.
Visually, Firefox and Opera are left in the dust by Safari’s clean and simple interface. But with some customization of the toolbars I was able to get Opera looking very much like Safari. The skin I used is Joergs_Safshiirad_mac
Being able to make Opera visually appealing also improved my enjoyment of using it.
To switch or not to switch?
It is interesting looking at those Version Tracker ratings again, as they fit with my experience too. Firefox and Safari are good but I’ve become enamored with Opera despite the window refresh problem - which interesting only began occurring today after I thought I had this review all wrapped up. Murphy’s Law!
So it comes down to a choice between beachballs and manual refreshes. I’m going to go with the manual refreshes.
Opera will be my primary browser from now on. As I do develop a few websites for myself I will continue to use Firefox for checking structures etc on other sites. Safari? It will be hard to let go. If it wasn’t for Safari’s beachballs, I wouldn’t even have considered switching. So I’ll keep it around and give each new version a spin.
Note to Apple
Besides the performance issue, features Safari could add to entice me back are:
- Remembering open pages on restart
- List all open pages on the Window menu
- Improved RSS viewing eg a three pane layout like NetNewsWire does
- An optional dialog box on downloads asking where to save
- Draggable tabs
As a Mac user, Safari should be the browser of choice, but for me, Opera now is.
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Comments
Three things:
1. I used to love this site and frequent it often. Knowing that a pop-under ad is guaranteed to arrive has made me visit less. H-I-N-T.
2. Don’t ask me why, but I’ve always had a ‘cooties’ response to Opera. Maybe because it wasn’t free and free options were just as good.
3. SAFARI BOOKMARK EXPORTER (free):
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/11550
I too have noticed that Safari is slow. But my major complaint is that it doesn’t support CSS very well, which hasn’t been mentioned here—am I missing an update maybe?
I use Firefox for the extensions. That one feature sets it above and beyond any other browser, IMO. It also has tabs and all the rest. My only complaint is that I still have some site compatability issues and the interface itself is not much to look at.
To pimp AdiumX again, I think a lot of developers could learn a lot of things from this app (Adium). It has a bunch of neat features that web browsers could easily incorporate and thus be improved by.
Personally, I like Safari just fine. Sure, I get spinning beach balls with it, but most of the time it doesn’t bother me. Sometimes I welcome them to see if it crashes Safari and then I can try and figure out why. I also build WebKit weekly, so I guess my Safari is abnormal.
Ah, can’t edit comments… Safari supports CSS quite well, especially if you build the latest version of WebKit yourself.
The hard-lockup bug is not unique to Firefox. It can happen in Safari, Terminal, or anything that calls nslookupd—it just apparently gets tickled by a few banner ad sites that have come up recently. It’s a pretty well-documented bug in the OS that should be fixed in 10.4.3.
As for optionally choosing the download location, the “option” key gives you that option. I agree it should be on the default menu, but it is there.
I suspect as the open-source contributions to Safari gear up, it will rapidly outstrip the other closed-source and/or not-Mac-first browsers in functionality.
It is easy, but not intuitive, to import bookmarks from Safari into Firefox. First, export Safari’s bookmarks using the “Export” command from the File menu. Then in Firefox, open “Manage Bookmarks” from the Bookmarks menu. Now you can choose “Import” from the File menu and get the option to import from a file.
It’s strange that the option to import from a file is not included in the import window you get from the main file menu. That is where most people would look first.
just click stop then reload. it doesn’t happen that often to me. i have some prob’s when vpn’d into work but i think they give pre-emptive rights to pages inside our domain.
Sorry, but again the review is biased against an Apple product…Safari is by far the browser most used in my iMac G5, lightning fast and compatible enough (with very few noticeable exceptions)...as a backup I have Opera, Camino and Mozilla…but please emphasize the “backup” in there, which is used for roughly 5% or less of my browsing experience…
Safari could be better? Yep, as any other browser…but to say it’s time to “ditch” it is to overreact to the point of absurdity…
Ah the old “delete the favicons trick”. (A slight homage to Maxell Smart there aka the late great Don Adams).
Yep. Had already done so a couple of weeks ago. If I’d remembered when writing this article, I would have went to town on that one. Deleting a feature to make something work? What the…?
Sounds like being told the only way to get your car’s air conditioner to work properly is to wind down the windows.
Why did you not mention the VERY BEST Macintosh Browser? I applaud your notion to Ditch Safari, we all thought it would pull through with 2.0, but nothing has really changed since the beginning, it’s still a Linux browser at heart. Since you don’t know already, Camino is where it’s at for state of the art browsing on the Mac. It’s a PURE Mac Browser, written in Cocoa, based on Mozilla, with a PURE Mac Interface, Keychain Support, the best imaging for OSX, etc, etc, etc. FireFox a PC BROWSER, not a Mac BROWSER, it’s just a PC Port! Opera isn’t mainstream, and Omniweb isn’t nearly as polished as Camino. To finally break the chains of Explorer and Safari… Camino is what you are looking for. http://www.caminobrowser.org Enjoy!
Small comment: Anyone who lets their opinion of software be influenced by VersionTracker RATINGS is nuts… It’s a useful place to find the latest software and updates to apps you have, but most of the people who rate products are extremely superficial users.
About Safari: it’s okay, needs to fix a memory leak from badly coded pages I think. Hopefully, 10.4.3 will address Safari amongst the MANY other things it’s meant to fix, but I’m going to give Camino a go based on the above comments.
Thanks os11, I did give Camino a brief mention. I didn’t consider it was coz it is in alpha. I know it is getting good reviews from its users though.
Mikataur, I’ve found VT and MacUpdate’s ratings quite reliable gor sorting the wheat from the chaff.
Finally, one more really really neat feature I just came across in Opera - it begins a download as soon as I click on the link - it doesn’t wait for me to decide where to save it. All browsers should have that feature.
Thank you for the nice review. I don’t know if anybody else pointed you to this but usually the redraw problems in Opera disappear if you disable Tools > Appearance > Skin Tab > “Enable special effects”.
I agree with mikataur that VersionTracker (and MacUpdate) ratings often seem based on superficial experience with apps. And the most helpful, informative comments are usually found by ignoring the emotionally overdramatic 5-start raves and 1-star rants. Still, those sites are the best I know for discovering new Mac apps and tracking updates. The trick is finding apps that aren’t listed on those sites.
Any Opera users here using its mail client?