2554 I've been writing a lot about browsers here lately, what with the recent released of the Firefox 3 and Opera 9.50 finals and a tsunami of iCab 4.1.1 betas. It's truly the best of times for Mac users in the browser department. Here's an update of my impressions of the current releases of four browser apps.

Firefox 3

The new interface on the Mac version is great, and this browser is astonishingly fast on certain sites, however, after my initial enthusiasm about those points, it began to register that Firefox 3 still has some rough edges and is a bit short on refinement. Nothing major like crashes or lockups, but just a certain clunkiness that I don't notice in Safari or iCab or even Opera.

I've found Firefox 3 especially frustrating on my old 550 MHz Pismo PowerBook, on which it sometimes for some reason just stalls out on certain sites that I visit often, refusing to complete loads or to fully refresh. This behavior is sporadic, but annoying enough that I have reverted to Netscape Navigator 9 on that computer, as smooth and polished a browser as you could ask for, and I've switched back to iCab 4.1.1 (currently beta 57) on my main workstation PowerBook in the role that I had been using Firefox 3 for.

iCab 4.1.1

As I wrote in a mini-review here yesterday, iCab, which has been an excellent browser again since the version 4 release at New Years, just gets better and better, managing to incorporate an amazing inventory of non-gimmicky,useful features without succumbing to bloat. It starts up lightning fast, may not be quite as swift at loading Web pages as Opera/Firefox/Safari but it's no slouch, can save Web pages as PDFs, has a new cache browser, the best tabs implementation in the category, and much, much more. It's just a pleasure to use. If you haven't tried to for a while. it's worth taking a look.
http://www.icab.de/

Opera 9.50

Opera is set as my default browser on all my computers, and I just can't say enough good about this application. It's fast, incredibly stable (even with a dozen and a half Web pages loading simultaneously over my heartbreakingly slow dialup connection), has the best Download Manager of any browser I've ever used, and rivals iCab for innovative and useful auxiliary features. The new default interface in version 9.50 is attractive, although I'm not sure I prefer it to the old one. Opera does occasionally have problems with page rendering on certain sites. For example, Macworld's site looks hideous in Opera with the text rendered illegibly in dark grey on a slightly darker background. However, on the plus side, text copied and pasted from Opera retains its paragraph formatting, which it doesn't in Safari. In general, I have to say that Opera is my favorite browser of the current crop.

Safari

I usually have Safari up and running even when I'm using other browsers for most of my stuff. It's so closely integrated with OS X that it's sometimes the best choice for certain tasks, it's fast and reliable, although at times its hogging of memory and processor capacity can get out-of-hand, requiring a program quit and restart to calm things down. I remain underwhelmed by Safari's user interface, which is the dullest and most boringly plain-vanilla of all these browsers. I'm looking forward to Safari 4.

Charles W. Moore

Tags: Blogs ï Commentary ï

Login † or † Register † †