Up until the release of Firefox 3 from Mozilla, I was an avid Safari user. I love its simple interface, speed, and sleek design. However, once this new Firefox came into the game, I was sold. Touting the fastest JavaScript engine, a large library of must have add-ons, and a more secure way to browse when it was released, FF3 has a lot going for it over Safari in my opinion. Now, on top of that, Google has released Chrome, a browser that many people seem to love despite how new it is. Furthermore, Firefox is now creating hype over their Minefield project and IE 8 is on its way. In all of this browser news, where has Safari been?
The truth is, we haven’t seen much from Safari lately other than negative PR. In today’s tech industry, this obviously isn’t good for the browser and its market share. Where other companies and browsers are making rapid updates and constantly improving upon existing code, it appears as if Safari has been at a standstill lately. Although it is very fast and secure in its current state, it can always use improvements or even new features.If Apple doesn’t do this soon, Safari will soon become lost and forgotten in the browser industry, which is one thing it—as a great browser—doesn’t deserve.
All this speculation, however, leads to my initial question, where does Safari stand in today’s browser industry? Or, better yet, which browser have you been using for the past few months? Like I said, I’ve been using FF3 and I’ve heard many Windows users are using Chrome as well as FF. What will happen when Chrome for Mac is released? Will even more web surfers diverge from Safari use? These are all very good questions that can only be answered with time as more updates come out in the next coming months.
Safari has been and always will be a Mac browser. Regardless of what Apple says, it obviously doesn't care that much about getting Safari big marketshare on Windows.
Apple software is by and large a joke on Windows. It still remains the best browser on the Mac, though. It is the fastest, best looking, and most out of the way. Firefox is slower, more bloated, and all it offers over Safari that I see is add-ons, which I find are more annoying than anything.
Safari 4 will once again blow everything else out of the water. The one downfall with Safari is that it's release cycle is OS-linked, so we don't see new versions and features until new OSes are released.
I've really tried to love Safari, but for me at least it seems to take forever to load.
I tried Firefox 3 and absolutely hated it. Pages don't fit properly on my Mac requiring constant left-right scrolls if you have the page magnified at anything other than standard.
Firefox goes down as often as a cheap lady of the evening.
Firefox 3 is TERRIBLE! On Linux and Windows both, it leaks memory so badly I can't go an hour without it disappearing from OOM. And for some reason, it allocates most of its memory as unpagable, so even if I have ungodly amounts of swap, it still manages to suddenly disappear (without an error message) every 200 – 400 page views, on both platforms. If I wasn't a programmer myself, I wouldn't even know why this was happening (out of memory killer), so I know the rest of the world is hating this and switching to other browsers too.
It's TERRIBLE!!!!