Firefox 3 vs. Safari

January 17, 2008 - Mark

With the release of Firefox 3, there are going to be a lot of articles written (this one included!) about how Firefox stacks up against Safari. (Heluna is, first and foremost, a Mac shop, having learned long ago about Internet Explorer’s propensity towards attracting spyware.)

Many, many of those articles are going to conclude that Safari is a better browser. And it is, in almost every respect– except the most crucial one.

Yes, Safari is arguably faster than Firefox. Yes, it has a smaller memory footprint. Yes, it is more tightly integrated with the native look and feel of the Mac. Yes, the new Javascript engine for the upcoming version of Safari will run rings around anything the Mozilla Foundation can come up with. Yes, it just feels like a better web browser.

But it isn’t the better web browser.

What makes Firefox the better web browser is one very large architecture decision: the ability to modify the browser by way of plugins.

Yes, Safari sort of has the same kind of functionality, but Safari plugins are notoriously bad, more often than not crashing the browser, causing untold problems on Software Update day, and generally just behaving poorly. Firefox, on the other hand, has two addons that absolutely change the way you look at the web:

Adblock Plus. Automatically download a set of rules that block a huge percentage of ads on every site you visit. When you install Adblock Plus, you are looking at the web the way it was in 1995, before popups, flashing banner ads, and the web’s version of spam.
del.icio.us bookmark sync. Keep all of your bookmarks synced up via del.icio.us. From your laptop, to your home desktop, to your office PC, all of your bookmarks are the same on every copy of Firefox that you run, automatically. Again, this is the way the web should be.

Additionally, there are three more addons that no web developer should be without:

Firebug. The ability to inspect HTML code, view actual network connections and latency, make changes to the CSS on the fly to test out various changes, and all sorts of other invaluable tools for the web developer. This makes debugging complex HTML extremely easy.
YSlow for Firebug (an addon for an addon). If you’ve ever had your site flooded by a mention on Slashdot, or Digg, or Reddit, etc, and you’d like to know how you can speed up your site, YSlow will give you very specific instructions. Everything from modifying cache times in your Apache configuration, to placing Javascript lower on the page to speed up rendering times, YSlow is filled with extremely helpful hints.
Finally, Greasemonkey. This could be classified as more of a general user addon, but it’s still in the phase of requiring a bit of technical knowledge. The functionality of various Greasemonkey scripts, however, will again change how you look at the web.

Safari is a great browser. It is arguably the best-written, best-performing browser ever written. Until it gets the functionality listed above, however, it will always be second fiddle to Firefox.