My Own Personal Browser War

I’ve been a pretty die-hard Firefox fan since its birth, and really even before that. Firefox spawned from Mozilla, which arose out of the cinders of Netscape, which was the next progression of Mosaic, the first real browser – and I used them all. Each incarnation has been my primary browser since every other competitor has paled in comparison. Flock was a nice idea, but overcomplicated a world that needed simplification. Opera certainly tries hard, but doesn’t quite get it. Safari sure looked pretty but just didn’t have the skills. Chrome is nice, but is really just a new UI and some mild tweaks on top of the same WebKit engine Safari uses. Internet Explorer… well, let’s not go down that dark, smelly hole. Firefox has had the upper hand when it comes to rendering pages consistently and, more importantly, rendering them properly. The plugin architecture is unparalleled and so incredibly useful that every other major player has scrambled to mimic it and only managed a half-assed attempt. For development, Firefox is flat-out unbeatable. Its standards support and add-ons like FireBug and the Web Developer Toolbar give Firefox some serious kung fu.

But, sadly, today is the day that Firefox lost its crown as the Lord of All Browsers on my computer.

It’s a choice I’ve been fighting against for months now. I don’t want to make it, I don’t want to move to another browser for my all-day, every-day use, but at this point the decision is undeniable.

Why? Firefox has grown sluggish. It’s stable, which is great, but it’s become a RAM glutton and I’m frequently waiting painfully long periods of time for it to do simple tasks. I usually have, and need, many tabs open at once. If not tabs, then I need windows. Either way, the ability to have multiple pages open at once and cylcle between them is vital to my daily productivity. Over the last few releases this has grown steadily slower and slower. Pages and windows lag more and more. I’ve unistalled and reinstalled Firefox, disabled and even totally cleaned out all plug-ins, but the sluggish behavior remains.

Where am I going? Who gets the crown? Safari 4. It’s speedy, stable (about damn time), handles multiple pages and tabs very nicely, renders well and doesn’t chew up RAM like a hippo at a buffet (unless… There’s a caveat I’ll get to shortly). For the last couple of months I’ve been running Firefox 3.6 and Safari 4 side by side. The difference is undeniable, Safari wins on speed and system resources* every time. Maybe this is due in part to Safari and Cocao integration on OSX. Maybe Snow Leopard gives Safari a little nitrous oxide while ignoring the other kids, I’m not sure. The end result is that, at least on OSX, Safari runs smoother than Firefox.

*The caveat. Safari is great… until it plays Flash video or other large Flash objects. Chrome has this same affliction, and since they’re both based on WebKit it’s obvious that WebKit hates Flash about as much as Adobe hates Steve Jobs these days. Firefox still wins here, and by a landslide. Oddly enough, Flash competitor Sliverlight bombs horribly on Firefox but plays nicely with WebKit.

So Safari is the new hotness. Does that make Firefox the old and busted? Not at all. Firefox is still absolutely unparalleled as a web development browser. Sure, Safari and Chrome finally have some debugging tools, but they’re weak and feeble in comparison. So much so, that they’re nearly useless. Firefox + Firebug + FireCooke + PageSpeed + Web Developer Toolbar still has some serious kung fu and it won’t be leaving my system, or even my daily use, any time soon. But it’s become a heavy toolbox. Often, I just want to jump on the web and go – and, at least for now, Safari is my new vehicle of choice.