The world’s greatest web browser
It doesn’t exist. There are some hotshot contenders to the browser crown for sure, but not one of them has nailed it.
The big news yesterday was Apple announcing a beta of Safari 3 for both Mac and Windows. It even made page 2 of Metro which is a little bit weird.
Safari has long been the browser of choice for Mac Daddy’s everywhere and now it fancies it’s chances against the behemoth, the king of the hill, the undisputed champion of the world and the object of hate for any self-respecting web developer — Internet Explorer. Safari, you’re going to take a beating.
Microsoft’s ability to completely ignore the voice of the people combined with Firefox’s top-notch rendering ability, security (apart from the master password thing), wealth of extensions and the power of nerd, has led Firefox, over the past four years, to gradually nibble away at Internet Explorer’s user base to gain a respectable market share of 15%. Safari sits just below 5% while poor old Opera is struggling to make 1%[1]. I’m not sure where Navigator 9 fits in.
So how is Safari going to take that market share? What’s it offering over Internet Explorer or Firefox? It’s faster, apparently, not that 95% of it’s potential users would ever notice. The majority of PCs out there are so crammed full with AOL limited trials, Anti-Virus, Anti-Spam, Anti-Spyware, Google Desktop, Adobe Speed Launch, and all that other guff which gets pre-installed by manufacturers desperately trying to squeeze that little bit more profit out of each sale, that Mr. G. Higgins of Chesterfield has to endure 30 seconds of disk swapping before Windows will even let him double-click on the Safari icon, if he can find it on his desktop that is, which is chock-full of downloaded .EXEs, hilarious email attachments and misplaced documents.
And exhale.
What I’m trying to say is that Safari isn’t really offering anything else over Internet Explorer for PC users, except giving that tiny percentage who have a functional Dell but really like the look of that shiny Apple and might even consider buying one if they didn’t cost three times as much as a PC, a bit of Mac Love. It’s too little, too late.
Firefox really should have nailed it by now. It towers above the competition, the extensions are superb, even my online bank strongly recommends it, but
it
can be
really
s l o w.
And it doesn’t look like a Mac app on the Mac, which isn’t that important to me, but probably is to the majority of Mac users. And it doesn’t use the Keychain (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=106400 - 5 ½ years old!). And it isn’t written by Apple.
Still, I keep using Firefox even though I don’t really want to, so when Camino 1.5 was announced this week I got a little too overexcited before being quickly disappointed. Camino is fast, it looks like a Mac app (it is a Mac app), it uses the Keychain, it imports my Safari or Firefox bookmarks and even duplicates Firefox’s bookmark keywords which is such a nice touch (are you listening Apple?), but despite having ‘Mozilla Power’ it doesn’t have Firefox extension support (and never will) which means I can’t use Firebug, del.icio.us, Google Notebook, Tails and all the other add-on goodness which I can with Firefox. Game over.
So you see, the perfect browser really doesn’t exist. It almost does, and every feature you could possibly want exists in one of the leading contenders, but not one of them has managed to combine them into the one true browser. The crown is there for the taking.
- [1] Source: NetApplications
Posted by Olly on June 12, 2007 at 9:35 am in apple, browsers, news, safari3
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