Friday, December 07, 2007

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.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Here's the problem: I'm addicted to the AdBlock and FlashBlock extensions for Firefox. I can't even go to espn.com, hoopshype.com, realgm.com, or other "times square" type sites without it because it's too distracting.

Other minor quibble with Safari: I like being able to see the url behind a link in the status bar on the bottom of Firefox when I put my mouse pointer on it. Safari doesn't have it because it wants a clean look, but I miss it.

-A

Karl Rosaen said...

I agree that not having firefox extensions is a major bummer.

You don't have to live without the status bar though, just go to View > Show Status Bar.

Karen Wiggins said...

Good readinng this post