Browser wars

I have quite a list of browsers installed on OS X simply out of curiosity when new announcements arrive. I am a browser hopper using a browser for a couple weeks/months until it gets on my nerves and I switch to something new/old. However, Firefox definitely gets most of the browsing time and this morning I just switched back to it again. Here’s my entirely subjectively speaking rating:

The winner
Firefox – the most innovative and versatile browser. Blocks ads and handles tabs the way I want it. Usually I ground it when it starts to get slow on an older computer, but I keep returning. Currently I am running Firefox 3 Beta 5 absolutely smoothly with no hick-ups at all.

The competitor
Where Firefox is slowing down, Camino comes to save the day. It’s lightweight and has adblock included by default. The price tag for speed, however, is a limited set of functions (e.g. no tab rearrangements). The last time it got grounded for not interacting well with Google Documents, but apparently this has been fixed with the latest release.

The social oldie
Flock is great at handling your accounts on Web 2.0 sites as they are literally one click away. However, as the Flock project is still rather new, they lack the most recent updates and functions. Furthermore, I don’t need to stay connected with all my social sites all the time as webmail is permanently open in a tab of its own and I’m rather selectively visiting other sites. Flock got grounded this morning for not rendering my Webmail.

The boring fundament
There’s nothing really wrong with Safari, but it’s not really exciting either. You get what Apple thinks is best for you which covers most what the average user needs, but nothing more. Annoys me because you can’t force it to open all links as tabs.

The northern competitor
There was a time after the depart of Netscape and before the advent of Firefox when we used Opera on Windows for added security. Every once in a while I still download Opera for the Mac to see how it’s doing, but it always gets quickly boring.

Internet Explorer
Oh yeah, this one exists, too. I once had the completely outdated version for the Mac because the brilliant developers of some router I owned had the router administration render correctly only in IE but not in Mozilla derivates. Well, the router is gone and so is the browser.