Friday, October 08, 2004

Which browser to use on the Mac: Safari or Firefox?

I have been using Mozilla Firefox on both Windows XP and Mac OS X since the 1.0 Preview Release came out. On Windows, I wholeheartedly recommend Firefox over IE 6.0 SP2. I have one caveat though. If you have to work routinely with a lot of Microsoft specific properties (SharePoint, Microsoft.com), you are probably better off leaving IE as your default and manually choosing Firefox whenever you can. For non-work browsing on Windows, I always recommend Firefox and it's the reason I have the button on the bottom right hand bar of this blog. On the Mac, the browser recommendation is not so cut and dry. I almost always use Safari for a few reasons: - I like the elegance of the interface - All my bookmarks are already defined in Safari - I want sites to know that I am on the Mac, in case they don't break out Firefox for different platforms - Safari performs better for me. I do however have to use Firefox from time to time, mostly because some sites work on Firefox (www.citibank.com) that don't work in Safari. The reverse is also true, www.sharebuilder.com was an example I ran into the other day. I love the idea of having the same browser on both platforms, but it seems like I will be using 3 browser for the forseeable future.