March 31, 2008

Best Web Browser for your Online Work

I have been using Safari for quite awhile. I have Firefox installed for those web pages that seem to require it. I am interested in the little cottage industry of web browsers still out there, some of them very powerful. I'm not sure any are a clear choice for pastors/scholars... Firefox has so many plug-in options, there is great potential there. Macworld just released a very good survey of the Mac browser landscape called "The Browser Bunch". It includes sections on: Comparison charts

Interface summaries

Rendering Engines

Web standards compliance

Plug-ins

Forms/passwords

Privacy/security

and suggestions on finding the right browser for you (pay or free)

It's a very well done article. It does conclude that for most folks, Safari is the best choice, with Firefox also with merits. (It seems I had gotten it right even before reading the article.)

Update: Or you can go old school.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I'm a Safari fan too. I have to use FireFox because Google Docs doesn't support Safari (yet). But my biggest problem with Safari is that it doesn't display Unicode Hebrew correctly.

R. Mansfield said...

Like you, Joe, I tend to use Safari first and Firefox second. For the longest time, I had to still use the old IE 5.2 for an occasional Microsoft only site, but I haven't come across one of those in a long time. I still have it on my Macs, but it's collecting dust. I guess eventually, I'll save a copy somewhere and delete it from my working setup.

I've always been tempted to devote a week to using OmniWeb. It always seems to get high marks in these kinds of comparisons. Plus, it goes all the way back to the NeXTStep days.

Joe Weaks said...

Rick,
Many of the "must use IE" sites are simply old sites that don't validate with the User Agent specified but will in fact work great with Safari or Firefox. There are debug menus you can activate and tell Safari to identify itself as IE for those sites.