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Mac OS X: State Of The Browsers

Posted by timothy on from the but-apple-is-doomed dept.

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..."

3 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. Real world experience by ihatewinXP · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    ---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
    1. Re:Real world experience by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  2. Re:The best part about this by edsel · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.