Finally a fast browser for OS X that supports Google apps

I like Macs, but up until recently, I wasn't happy with its available browsers. My first choice was to stick with Firefox, since I am pretty happy with it on Windows and Linux. For some reason though, Firefox has an exclusive Mac OS X feature of sucking; it hangs all the time, and seems quite a bit slower than Safari. So I tried Safari (version 2 at the time), and found it to be alright, but was disappointed that the support for google web apps on it was lacking. Gmail worked at a basic level (no chat integration though), reader sort of worked but had a bunch of subtle UI bugs, and docs just flat out wasn't supported. Camino, which uses the same layout engine as Firefox but has a native OS X UI, seemed like a good choice for a while since it supported Google apps better, but never seemed to fully meet my expectations. It wasn't quite as slick as Safari, and not quite as versatile as Firefox.

I recently upgraded to Safari 3, and was delighted to find full support for gmail, reader and docs and spreadsheets. That isn't the only improvement over Safari 2 either, it has a lot of snappy UI improvements, and seems even faster. Going to Amazon or nytimes.com is like flipping to a TV channel when I'm on a high speed connection and it's the first browser I've used that allows you to pull a tab out into its own window too, something that ends up being very useful when I find myself with 10+ tabs open.

Url Encoded Charts

Creating by encoding them in a url is just too easy.



I'm guessing we'll start to see a lot more sites like this :)