Firefox 3 Kills Safari

On Macs. Safari has ruled the browser space since its release in 2003. Serious challenges were put up by the likes of Firefox and Opera, but most users found themselves returning to Safari. Firefox 3, however, will stymie that return to Safari.

I'm not sure when was the last time anyone wrote a piece about Apple without mentioning its cellular device. Well rejoice, because you're not going to hear it from me today. In fact, since I'm talking Firefox and Safari, you won't hear any "i" words mentioned.

Safari has been my browser of choice ever since it came out. I've dabbled with others, such as Opera and Firefox and Flock, but always found my self coming back to Safari. However, because Safari (despite claims otherwise) is incompatible with more websites than Firefox, I've always kept Firefox at hand. Doing a little web development sometimes, I also kept it handy for testing purposes.

Firefox's biggest problem in the past, and reason I never switched to it, was it was a memory hog, worse than even Safari.

Earlier this year though I upgraded my Mac's memory to 3GB. As you'd imagine, everything runs better.

Except for one application. One app still gave me grief. Still gave me incessant beachballs. Still hangs or crashes every couple of days or so. Every other app is performing better with the memory increase -- except one.

And that rogue app is Safari.

I will acknowledge that it has improved in its stability since version 3. With version 2 hangs and crashes occurred every day. Now they're just every two or three days.

A few weeks ago I'd had enough. I decided to force myself across to Firefox full-time. I say forced because we all know that switching - although beneficial - can be a chore. Even when it's a little thing like switching browsers. Familiarity breeds content, after all.

The easiest we way to force yourself to switch browsers is to go into Safari's preferences and change the default browser to Firefox (or your preferred browser).

I have been using Firefox 3 as my primary browser for a month now. In that time it has not hung, beachballed, or crashed once. Let me repeat that:

In one month of heavy usage, with dozens of pages open, Firefox 3 has not hung, beachballed or crashed once.

I'm converted!

The only problem I've encountered is very occasionally the address bar stops retrieving pages when your press enter in it. That's easily remedied by opening a new browser window.

Firefox does have some frustrations still. It's not a real Mac app. It's print dialog doesn't bring up the preview pane lieke Safari, and dragging and dropping images from webpages still doesn't work as smoothly as in Safari. But the thing I miss most is not having access to OS X's dictionary lookup. But I'm sure with a bit of hunting, I'll find a plug-in to do the same thing. It's also annoying having to restart it every time you install a new extension.

I have to admit though, it does seem slightly slower than Safari at loading pages, although, only on large pages. So it's not a problem or hindrance.

Basically, Firefox 3 kills Safari. After the fact it never hangs or crashes, Firefox 3's next biggest advantage is, as I mentioned earlier, that it's compatible with more websites than Safari. And the plethora of plug-ins for it is also a home run for Firefox.

Apple, Safari sucks. Sucks resources that is. If you don't fix it fast, Firefox will quickly swallow Safari. Because I know I for one can't stress enough that people are better off with Firefox 3.

So, folks, if you're fed up with Safari's bogginess, now is the time to give Firefox a serious look. And don't just look, make the switch.