Alex's Journal

Yesterday, Apple announced the release of Safari 4 at it’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Of course, I upgraded immediately from Safari 3 on my Mac. It seems like a pretty good update so far, but there is one major feature that Apple previewed in the beta version that didn’t make it to the final release.

One of my favorite features of Safari 4 Beta was the tabs on top, which Apple promptly got rid of in the final release of the browser. This feature I liked because I tend to overshoot the tabs quite often and, instead of selecting the tab I want, I click on a bookmark in my bookmarks bar. With the tabs on top, the problem was thus solved. Unfortunately, Apple did away with that feature with no option to change it back. I have to say that I’m fairly disappointed with that.

I realize, of course, that there are many good changes that came about in Safari 4. One of them being the better JavaScript performance through the new JavaScript engine, Nitro. I also really do like the way the new address bar looks. The changes were very subtle, but it looks better in my opinion. Apple, for some unexplained reason, removed the progress bar that was embedded in the address bar and was replaced with a small blue rectangle at the end that says “Loading…”.

Overall, it was worth upgrading despite the tabs now being in their traditional location underneath the bookmarks bar.

I read an interesting article online that talks about the latest studies finding Firefox to be the safest browser available.

“Firefox users were far and away the most likely to use the latest version, with an overwhelming 83.3 percent running an updated browser on any given day. However, despite Firefox’s single click integrate auto-update functionality, 16.7 percent of Firefox users still continue access the Web with an outdated version of the browser, researchers said.

The study also revealed that the majority of Safari users (65.3) percent were likely to use the latest version of the browser between December 2007 and June 2008, after Safari version 3 became available.

Meanwhile, Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT)’s Internet Explorer users ranked last in terms of safe browsing. Between January 2007 and June 2008, less than half of IE users — 47.6 percent — were running the most secure browser version during the same time period.”

The war between browsers has made its way onto my laptop. When I bought my first Mac several years ago, Mac OS X was brand new and the only options for browsers were Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape. I was always a Netscape user. Eventually Microsoft ceased to support Internet Explorer for the Mac. The release of Jaguar (Mac OS X 10.2) brought with it a replacement for Internet Explorer and a new competitor in the browser field: Apple’s Safari.

Since the release of Safari, I have been pretty adamant about it. Its integration with Apple’s OS and its speed were key features that kept me glued to it. When Netscape eventually failed and out of its ashes arose Mozilla’s Firefox, I tried Firefox and immediately fell in love with it. I used it consistently from version 1 through version 2.0.0.6. About that time, Apple released version 3 of their browser and with that release came several features I had grown used to in Firefox, so I decided to give Safari another go. I was yet again impressed with its speed and again with its tight OS integration. That was enough to cause me to switch yet again. The extensions I had gotten used to in Firefox, such as my Gmail notifier extension, I forewent and quickly realized I didn’t need them. The memory usage was far less and the nuances that bugged me in Firefox such as menus occasionally not closing when switching applications were non-existant in Safari.

After getting used to Safari again, I realized that it wasn’t compatible with some of the websites I use quite frequently. For these sites, I had to open Firefox. For months I have been switching between the two browsers, even occasionally switching back over to Firefox entirely. This gets old after a while as I keep having to reimport bookmarks between the browsers and often times I have both browsers open at the same time doubling the memory usage which is of concern to me as my computer is relatively old with only 768 MB of RAM.

Fortunately I happened to run into what seems like it will be a solution as I was browsing the internet last night. I ran into the Camino browser. Although I had known about it before and have even downloaded it and played with it, it never really occurred to me that it would solve all of the problems I have with Firefox and bring with it most of what I like about Safari. Given, the feature set is not up to what either Safari or Firefox offer, but I can get used to that. Not to mention the next major version is in its beta stages and includes many of the features of Safari that I use quite frequently.

Also made by Mozilla, the whole idea behind Camino is to provide Gecko — the rendering engine that powers Firefox — with a native Mac interface instead of Firefox’s clunky XUI which is the source of what I find to be most obnoxious about Firefox. Because of its use of Gecko, Camino is compatible with the websites I use and because of its use of a native interface, it provides an eloquent environment for browsing the web. I have now been using Camino for the past couple of days and I must say that I quite enjoy it.

You can find more about Camino and download it on their website. Camino is a free, open source program.