Fluttering Carefully

I have been a long-time fan of Safari, since I received my first Mac (PowerBook G4, early January 2006). I think the font and style rendering are superb. When I first got Windows XP running (late October 2001) I loved the font-smoothing (ClearType). However, that is not close to the excellence with which I saw it done on the Mac in Safari. I have long been an advocate of Safari for Mac and Firefox for Windows. However, when Safari came out on Windows, I was running Win2K and thought it would not work, so I glossed over it.

I have been very impressed for a long time with Safari, all the more when Safari 3 came out. The new DOM inspector in the Debug menu was very nice, and in a later release, it only got substantially better (DOM Inspector|Network Pane). And really, KHTML/Webkit is a very nice document-rendering engine.

That was then, this is now. It (in a small way) pains me to say that Firefox 3 knocks Safari’s socks off. This is problematic for me, because it proves that I am the fanboy that I never wanted to be. I should be happy to simply say, yeah it is vastly superior and move on, but I am pained by it. The truth is out. ACK!

Since Firefox 3 came out, I have been impressed three more times by Firefox:

• The font-rendering and over all appearance has been solidly improved.
• The awesome bar is…well…awesome.
• It no longer looks like a ported Windows application, it is solidly Mac, which is a nice

Those are certainly not the only things, but they strike me as the most important new features. It’s extensibility is also a very important feature, namely the plug-ins that I find myself (or forget that I am) using constantly or at least frequently:

• Firebug is an excellent, nimble, powerful HTML/JS/CSS debugger, and it does it all on-the-fly. It can bog page loads a bit at times, but the app itself is quite speedy.
• NoScript is an extension allows you to turn off JS for a site by default. It is also interesting to see how well implemented a site’s JS is and what features are reliant on it. It can, however, be as annoying as useful.
• Adblock Plus is another great application that blocks a lot of unsightly (or unseemly) advertisements, e.g. those depicting scantily-clad women, etc. It comes with a free subscription service that allows you to use the recommendations of others that have stumbled upon noxious content.
• Others include the Web Developer toolbar, 1Password for Mac, IETab and IE View Lite for Windows
• Another feature that is not new, though often overlooked, is the find-as-you-type text search. If you enable it in Tools>Options…>Advanced Tab>General Sub-tab>Accessibility box>“Search for text when I start typing” it will allow you to find text as you type it. Furthermore, using the apostrophe (single quote or “’”) first will look only in link text. That has been such a great productivity booster! It is not impressive to consider how useful it is until you consider the IE6/7 Crtl+F search, or a similar search.
• Greater use of non-modal dialogs that appear at top and bottom in banners or ribbons, like the password saving that you can approve after you have seen that it is was correct. NoScript also uses a banner at the bottom to notify that scripts remain unexecuted.

The only thing that I really miss of the features I expected is the lack of support for Mac’s Keychain Application. Firefox stores them in its own space.

I think one thing that Safari has always done well is a simple and inviting user interface which keeps their products from becoming bloated. Firefox has the poor distinction of often seeming bloated because we (yes, me included) often load on too many add-ons and become disgusted by how slow it becomes. That is not Firefox, it is my overburdening of it.

Safari’s lack of those features has made it increasingly unable to be the heavy-lifting browser I need in my daily work as a web developer, designer and administrator. (Of course that does not free me from my duty to test in IE 6&7, Firefox and Safari.)