Safari vs. Firefox

[olga]

When I had my old laptop, I downloaded Firefox and used it almost all of the time. It worked with Photobucket, which Safari didn't. On the other hand, Safari worked better for chat rooms. Most of the time I used Firefox.

I've been using Safari on my new MacBook, and I guess I thought that with a new computer and the latest version of Safari, it would be faster. But I'm sitting here for several seconds at different websites, waiting for the pages to load. Whassup with that? Is Safari that much slower? I can download Firefox and use it, but I thought I would try Safari and give it a chance.....but it is so slow!

Can someone explain in words of one or two syllables why it's so slow? I'm just curious.

olga

[Maddy]

IDK. I gave up on Safari back in 2005 or so. It was too slow for me back then. Me love firefox long time.

[nalgas]

I have never been a fan of the Mac version of Firefox. On other OSes, sure, I like and use it, but the Mac version has always bugged me. It just feels so out of place in a lot of ways, and they've only recently even started to acknowledge that as a problem for some people.

Safari was sort of slow many years ago, but that hasn't been true for a long, long time. Safari 3.2, or whatever the most recent release version is these days, has always been plenty fast and roughly comparable to stuff like Firefox and Opera. Actually, that's probably been true since 3.0. On the other hand, the beta of Safari 4 that they put up for people to play with won all sorts of "Which browser is the fastest?" tests by a decent margin. When it comes down to it, though, for the vast majority of things people do, if your computer is even remotely recent, the different browsers are almost indistinguishable from each other in terms of speed.

So, your two word answer is: It's not. The longer version is that there's nothing inherently slow about it, and unless you've discovered some sort of freak configuration or bug that makes it get all wonky (which is always possible...), I would suspect it's more likely to be network-related than browser-related.

[olga]

Makes sense, Nalgas, except for the fact that this is the same network I've been using all along---same DSL----same ISP. But Safari is noticably slower than Firefox was on my old laptop. I think I'll download Firefox and see how it does.

olga

[I'mNotPhyllis]

Olga,

I use Safari on my year old IMAC and it is very fast. The only issues I've had is using Gmail and Safari, but I think I fixed that one. Does your new Macbook have new anti-virus/firewall etc. software that might be slowing down Safari?

[olga]

I don't know---I'll have to poke around in the security stuff and see what's there.

I downloaded Firefox this morning and it loads pages much faster than Safari. I don't get it. Anyway, I've got them both in the dock, so I can use either one.

olga

[sdjeff]

Just downloaded and started using Firefox today. So far me likey.

[wifezilla]

Unfortunately I find my self switching back an forth between the two. Sometimes Firefox just freezes up and I have a corrupt font somewhere. Bleh.

[Maddy]

I bounce between Firefox & Camino.

Safari is slooooowww for me.

It always has been.

[N&P]

Unfortunately I find my self switching back an forth between the two. Sometimes Firefox just freezes up and I have a corrupt font somewhere. Bleh.

Me too. I've also used Omniweb in the past but it's a bit cumbersome.

[sdjeff]

I really, really like firefox. To compare it to Safari is like comparing a Ferrari F40 to an old Ford Pinto.

[Penny Century]

what do you all think of google's chrome?

[nalgas]

I really, really like firefox. To compare it to Safari is like comparing a Ferrari F40 to an old Ford Pinto.

Ok, as good as Firefox is at some things, that's a pretty ridiculous exaggeration, even if you're talking about the Windows version of Safari. The only browser that deserves to be compared to a Pinto is maybe something like IE6. Heh.

The rendering engines and all that stuff behind the scenes are pretty comparable to each other these days, in terms of speed and features and accuracy (although the code for Safari's (WebKit) is cleaner and smaller and less of a clusterfuck than Firefox's (Gecko), which is probably why Google used WebKit as the backend for Chrome). What that leaves as the main thing distinguishing them is the interface.

As far as customizability and extensions and stuff like that, Firefox wins easily, and that is not in any way debatable. It's just true. If there are Firefox extensions you like or need to use (and some of them are very useful), it's by far the best for stuff like that. However, all of that comes at the cost of it not integrating well with the features of the OS it's running on, because it has to make that tradeoff to allow all of those things to work cross-platform, and to me, that makes Firefox feel clunky. That's where Safari comes out ahead (or something like Camino, which uses Gecko to display stuff but has a native OS X interface...looks and feels and acts more like it fits in, but you sacrifice the ability to use most extensions for that). So, really it's down to personal preference and what you use it for and how you use it. Yeah, they're both good in different ways, but not quite so different as a Ferrari and a Pinto. Heh.

Chrome is kind of neat, and I like some of the ideas behind its design. I hope some things about it, like the security practices behind some of the design ideas, get picked up by other people, because they will make everyone's lives easier. I haven't really fooled around with it myself, though, since it only has a Windows version so far (the Mac and Linux ones are incomplete at this point), and I do very, very little web stuff on Windows, and I already have Firefox set up just fine for what I need for that. What I'm also rather interested in is how Stainless has expanded on some of the ideas in Chrome, and I want to see where that ends up. The parallel sessions stuff is pretty cool.