Mac Web browsers
Aug. 23rd, 2004 08:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinI was going to complain about this PC World article for missing most of the interesting Mac Web browsers, but I see she's going to handle them in a later column.
Personally, I keep switching back and forth between Safari and Camino; each one has features that I miss in the other. (Firefox fans can rest assured that I've tried Firefox and often use it on Linux; I like it, but the Mac version still feels like the creditable but slightly ragged port of non-Mac software that it is. Camino is in some ways the real Mac counterpart of Firefox; it's a lean Mozilla-based browser that uses the native Mac OS X interface widgets.)
Safari's page rendering and interaction are generally faster at this point; Camino's Gecko-based CSS layout is probably marginally more standard, though they both do very well with modern real-world pages. Safari's tabs have close widgets, but, on the other hand, they're drawn in a style that always confuses me as to the identity of the active tab when there are only two, whereas Camino's are completely unambiguous. Safari integrates better with the system spell-check service, and is better at letting you manually override a site's dinking with the browser controls on a case-by-case basis; but Camino has a slightly more customizable toolbar, better right-click navigation and better display of image URLs (like many other modern browsers, it scales down large images and you can display them at full size by clicking; Safari still doesn't do this).
In my experience Camino does a little better with Java applets in the real world, but Safari's less likely to choke on Flash. They are both excellent at popup blocking. Safari is marginally better at displaying Unicode-based pages, but you can only see the difference on really hard cases, such as relying on auto-encoding for pages in Indian alphabets that lack adequate encoding metadata. I prefer the way Camino looks, but your preference may vary.
I guess Freed felt compelled to review Internet Explorer/Mac since it's so historically important and was once the default browser, but given that it's dead software (and, feature-wise, has been dead much longer than she implies), I wouldn't recommend that anyone who relies primarily on Mac OS X use it except to access the few remaining sites that simply won't work with anything else. (If you're running Mac OS 9, on the other hand, it's probably still your best bet.)
Personally, I keep switching back and forth between Safari and Camino; each one has features that I miss in the other. (Firefox fans can rest assured that I've tried Firefox and often use it on Linux; I like it, but the Mac version still feels like the creditable but slightly ragged port of non-Mac software that it is. Camino is in some ways the real Mac counterpart of Firefox; it's a lean Mozilla-based browser that uses the native Mac OS X interface widgets.)
Safari's page rendering and interaction are generally faster at this point; Camino's Gecko-based CSS layout is probably marginally more standard, though they both do very well with modern real-world pages. Safari's tabs have close widgets, but, on the other hand, they're drawn in a style that always confuses me as to the identity of the active tab when there are only two, whereas Camino's are completely unambiguous. Safari integrates better with the system spell-check service, and is better at letting you manually override a site's dinking with the browser controls on a case-by-case basis; but Camino has a slightly more customizable toolbar, better right-click navigation and better display of image URLs (like many other modern browsers, it scales down large images and you can display them at full size by clicking; Safari still doesn't do this).
In my experience Camino does a little better with Java applets in the real world, but Safari's less likely to choke on Flash. They are both excellent at popup blocking. Safari is marginally better at displaying Unicode-based pages, but you can only see the difference on really hard cases, such as relying on auto-encoding for pages in Indian alphabets that lack adequate encoding metadata. I prefer the way Camino looks, but your preference may vary.
I guess Freed felt compelled to review Internet Explorer/Mac since it's so historically important and was once the default browser, but given that it's dead software (and, feature-wise, has been dead much longer than she implies), I wouldn't recommend that anyone who relies primarily on Mac OS X use it except to access the few remaining sites that simply won't work with anything else. (If you're running Mac OS 9, on the other hand, it's probably still your best bet.)
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Date: 2004-08-23 05:49 am (UTC)Then again, if I were more into multimedia content, I probably would turn pale at the thought of using Firefox because of that inane bug that keeps its helper-applications selection widget from comprehending the OS X concept of directories that act as application executables.
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Date: 2004-08-23 06:48 pm (UTC)The problems with those close-together tabs, and with the fact that the 'close X' is right on the tab, means that when selecting a tab, I often accidentally close it. Ick. Whereas Firefox/Camino put the close 'X' far away over on the right, a much safer place to put it.
Safari is marginally better at displaying Unicode-based pages, but you can only see the difference on really hard cases, such as relying on auto-encoding for pages in Indian alphabets that lack adequate encoding metadata.
Safari is not just marginally, but substantially better at displaying specifically Devanagari. Working with Devanagari every week as I do, this is quite a blessing. Opera 6.03 is/was just as good as Safari at rendering Devanagari, but Opera 7.5x broke everything (newer is not necessarily better).
If you're running Mac OS 9, on the other hand, it's [I.E.] probably still your best bet.
Not true in my opinion -- a third-party group has released several Mozilla-based browsers (since it is open source code, they have done so independently of the official Mozilla group) that continue to improve, even though the progress is behind that of the OS X versions. (And it was ahead of Netscape 7.1 for OS 9 for a long time.) Actually there are several groups who do this. Their builds are sort of tough to find, but still ... e.g. http://wamcom.org/20030624/macos9/ (I think).
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Date: 2004-08-23 07:51 pm (UTC)Didn't know about the third-party OS 9 Mozilla ports. That's nice. The last OS 9 Mozilla version I used was years ago, before Mozilla went 1.0, and it was pretty messed up.
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Date: 2004-08-23 08:39 pm (UTC)Some of those third-party Mozilla ports are up to 1.3 or 1.4. I don't know for sure since I haven't used OS 9 in a few months.
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Date: 2004-08-23 08:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-08-23 08:39 pm (UTC)