Back on Safari

Ah, Africa . . . I’ve never been (although I do enjoy Ernest Hemingway’s books set in Africa). However, I have been on a trip recently. A diversion from my normal use of Apple’s premiere web-browser, Safari. Over the last several weeks, I’ve been traveling the web via Firefox.

In case you haven’t heard, Firefox is the fast cross-platform web-browser that has been stealing the internet away from M$Explorer’s rotting carcass. It’s so popular that Firefox even received play on ABC. I like that it is open source. I like that it is free. I like its message: “Take back the web.” I like that it has a variety of extensions and add-ons to tweak the functionality. With version 1.0, much of the functionality that has been available to me in Safari was either available as part of Firefox or through extensions. So, I made the switch.

After several weeks of using Firefox, I’m back on Safari. 3 things really bugged the hell out of me: 1. Lack of squiggly-red integrated spellcheck. There’s a spellcheck extension available, but it doesn’t check as you type like Safari does. 2. Lack of Services menu support. This one really bothered me, as I am a regular user of the services menu. I often grab pages into DEVONthink via Command+Shift+) for later offline reading. 3. Links opening in new tabs that failed to load also failed to retain the failed address in the menu-bar for immediate attempts at reloading. This last one finally persuaded me to switch back. I was tired of having to close the empty tab, go back to the originating page, and re-click the link. Very annoying.

I’m keeping the Firefox button in the sidebar of my blog, and it’ll be my browser of choice whenever I’m forced to use a PeeCee (yuck!), as I still support what Firefox is trying to do, but Safari is really the better Mac browser. By and large, they are both great browsers, but Safari has Firefox beat in the details.

And lest you think Safari is lacking in the customization area, here’s a list of a few things to help you trick out Safari like one might trick out Firefox:

• Saft—Saft does lots of things, but what made me decide to drop $10 is its ability to remember all the tabs you have open and relaunch them all on the next launch of Safari. Saft also now supports Growl notification of downloads.
• Safari Stand—this choice piece of freeware may not have much English documentation to speak of, but it does help with bookmark management in Safari.
• Safari Keywords—this little hack adds multiple search engines to the Google search bar via keywords.
• PithHelmet—kills advertisements dead. Nice, free, and totally customizable as an advanced content filter.

Someday, maybe I’ll go back to the fox, but for now, I’m sticking with Safari.