Mac Web browsers
Aug. 23rd, 2004 08:05 amI 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.)