Mossberg: Firefox 3 is the best browser on the Mac
Walt Mossberg, personal technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal, believes Firefox is the “new champ in the browser wars.” Is Walt right? If so, will this worthy effort from Mozilla be enough to drag the Apple purists away from Safari?
From a Mac user’s perspective especially, Firefox 3 is a very significant upgrade that current users of the browser will surely enjoy. But for those like me who have been using Safari as our primary browser, this new version of Firefox may not be enough to wow us, especially for those of us who have never used the browser before.
Before I switched to the Mac about two years ago, I was a big fan of Firefox on the PC. This was before the introduction of IE 7, so the ideas of tabbed browsing and built in search seemed revolutionary to those of us who were still stuck on the Windows platform (Safari has had built in Google search since it was released in 2003). When I switched to the Mac, I figured it would be a no-brainer for me to continue using Firefox. I was very disappointed, however, when I tried out Firefox on the Mac and it seemed like nothing more than a bloated port of a Windows app. It stuck out like a sore thumb in such a nice streamlined Mac environment, and on top of that, it was as slow as molasses when compared to Safari. Up until the release of Firefox 3, all of the Mac versions of Firefox I tested were nowhere near up to snuff with Safari’s speed, ease of use, and elegant design. I’m happy to say that has changed.
The most obvious new feature of Firefox 3 on the Mac, is, of course, the complete revamp it’s design. It now looks and feels much more like a native Mac application and makes full use of Aqua.
Performance has improved a great deal as well. Safari has held the title of fastest browser on the Mac for quite a while, so I was surprised to learn that Firefox 3 did better in Mossberg’s tests. I’ve tested it myself, and the difference in speed is superficial, but it’s certainly a big upgrade for current Firefox users.
All in all, if you’re currently a happy Safari, user you probably won’t see much need to switch, but Firefox 3 is definitely worth trying out. It does have its advantages over Safari in the compatibility department, add-ons and some nice new features, even if it doesn’t work quite as seamlessly with the rest of Mac OS X (stuff like right clicking on a word to get a dictionary definition).
Product [Firefox]
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I can think of 3 reasons straight away as to why I won’t move from Safari. Firstly, my Safari bookmarks are synced to my iPod Touch. If I start using FF, my bookmarks on my Touch will get outdated. Secondly, I prefer Safari’s RSS reader. You can choose how much information to see for each feed, and you can see at a glance how many new articles there are in each feed. You can’t do that with FF. Plus thirdly, I use the Inquisitor plug-in for Safari, which is superb, and it isn’t available for FF.
on July 1, 2008 at 01:37 PM - LINKOne more thing- Firefox takes twice the amount of time to load than Safari on my Macbook. I don’t know what it’s like on faster machines.
on July 1, 2008 at 01:39 PM - LINKI have noticed a big difference in speed between Firefox 2 and 3, but I don’t really think it is THAT much faster than Safari, even if it did fare slightly better in Walt’s tests. I’ll be sticking with Safari as well because of it’s integration with Mac OS X and other Apple products
on July 1, 2008 at 02:29 PM - LINK