Mac OS X: State Of The Browsers

NetCurl writes "Ars Technica is running a Macintosh Browser Smackdown feature. We've come a long way in the OS X browser experience, and the article delves into the details like only Ars can. This is a great breakdown of nine browsers in all. Let the browser war reignite..."

Comments

Real world experience

[ihatewinXP]

Signing up for classes at uncc.edu my browser (Safari) was halted by a message saying that browserX was not accpeted and that I should try again with IE 5 for mac or Netscape 4.7. being that this is a brand new (as of this summer) site I felt it was early enough that my cries might be heard. So i dropped a letter catching the computing staff up on Apple browsers.

1st point - IE for mac is dead. dont tell me my only choice is to use a dead browser
2nd point - Netscape for mac is dead. dont tell me my only other choice is a dead browser.

After clearing this up I mentioned that Safari is now the default browser for Apple computers, that it works flawlessly with both my banks, and that if you want to include netscape in the list stick with Mozilla. If any browser besides Safari survives on the Apple platform it will be Mozilla based (sorry OmniWeb, I pray the switch to WebKit keeps you guys going).

And ill be damned they actually wrote me back, asked a few questions, and updated the site.

Re:Real world experience

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool that they responded, but for those sites that don't you can also fake Safari's user agent HTTP header. This is done from the Debug menu, which can enable in a number of ways:

- use one of the utilities that plays around with Safari (check versiontracker)
- use the defaults command from the shell: "defaults write com.apple.Safari EnableDebugMenu 1" or something like that
- use vi or another editor to edit Safari's XML preference file (while it's not running) and add a key called "EnableDebugMenu" with value "True" (this is the same thing the above command will do)

Next time you launch Safari it'll have a Debug menu on the right, from which you can set the reported user-agent.

Check the nightlies.

[mikedaisey]

There's also been an immense amount of improvements to Camino since 0.7--if you download one of the nightlies you'll see big speed improvements and stability. The nightlies are building on Moz 1.4, as opposed to 1.0 for the 0.7 release. Makes a big difference.

Making Mozilla/Netscape More Mac Like

[Paul Burney]

Installing the pinstripe theme would make the reviewer's opinion of Mozilla/Netscape better, I think. It gives the browser an aqua look.

It is available at:
http://kmgerich.com/pinstripe/pinstripe.html

The best feature of Moz 1.4, though, is type-ahead-find, or whatever they call it now. Just start typing to have the typed text highlighted and that part of the page jumped to. Great for pages you come to from a search engine.

Re:The best part about this

[edsel]

One thing that Ars Technica didn't mention is that MS does still have a browser for OS X. It just isn't available for free download - you have to subscribe to the MSN isp (I think) to get it.

According to this report MSN Explorer/Mac actually has the best support for CSS 3 selectors of any current browser. Too bad it's only available to paying customers.

Don't forget X11 browsers

[WatertonMan]

In addition to Safari, Camino, IE, Mozilla, and then a few other smaller projects, there are also all the X11 browsers that Fink installs. Beyond Lynx as someone else mentioned we have the X11 Mozilla, Dillo, Konquerer and many others.

Dillo in particular is amazingly fast basic browser that supports graphics unlike Lynx. Even Mozilla running under X11 is surprisingly fast. Must faster than any Aqua based browser I've used. (Mainly due to no AA and other such considerations)

I use Safari 99% of the time because I like all those Aqua frills and because I think its tab handling is the best on the market. But one shouldn't neglect the rest.