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john gruber compares safari 3 and firefox 3

April 04th, 2008 | Category: Mozilla

John Gruber at Daring Fireball delivers a typically direct, nuanced and fair comparison of the top browser contenders on Mac OS. As we’ve consistently said, healthy competition among browser developers improves the Web experience for everyone.

Most of my reasons for preferring Safari to Firefox are Mac-specific details. … For users new to the Mac, who aren’t aware of these details, Firefox 3 might be as good or better than Safari in nearly every way. (For anyone more used to Windows than the Mac, the text editing behavior in Firefox might feel right rather than wrong, as it does to me.)

In short, competition in the Mac web browser space is strong and getting stronger. Firefox isn’t just a great web browser, but it’s a pretty good Mac web browser, too.

6 Comments so far

  1. cris April 5th, 2008 8:58 am

    i wouldn’t call it fair

    awesome bar is “too clever”? how about safari’s urlbar too stupid? it wouldn’t even offer a drop down history list.

  2. Paul Kim April 5th, 2008 9:03 am

    @cris - Did you read it all the way down? About halfway through, after talking about Safari 3 wins, John starts pointing out Firefox 3’s advantages - among them much better memory usage and improvements to user interface.

  3. Kenguru April 5th, 2008 12:25 pm

    Is it not possible to distinguish between active and inactive Firefox windows on Mac? That sounds like a very serious problem … But most probably I misunderstood something. To be honest, I have never seen a real Mac (except on a picture).

  4. Alex Faaborg April 5th, 2008 4:40 pm

    We are aware of the text editing differences that he is mentioning, for instance hitting he up and down arrows to go to the start and end of text fields was surprisingly the 7th most requested feature for Firefox on OS X. Unfortunately that specific fix didn’t get into this release (bug 231754, marked as wanted-next).

  5. cris April 5th, 2008 6:27 pm

    fairness rests in each section, I don’t understand why he is right on awesomebar? as long as he praise something else about firefox?

    no, I judge each point on its own merits. To say safari’s urlbar is better than awesomebar, is, imho, simply ridiculous.

  6. foxiewire.com April 6th, 2008 2:29 am

    PKB » john gruber compares safari 3 and firefox 3…

    John Gruber at Daring Fireball delivers a typically direct, nuanced and fair comparison of the top browser contenders on Mac OS. As we’ve consistently said, healthy competition among browser developers improves the Web experience for everyone….

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