Well, just 10 days after posting my Browser test and deciding to use Apple’s Safari as my default browser, I switched back to Firefox yesterday. I just felt it’s fair to share my reasons with you.
Don’t get me wrong – Safari is an excellent browser. In many respects I still like it more than Firefox. I love its polished and shiny feel (like all things Apple, it looks amazing). I like the fact that it highlights the points I would probably be most interested in on web pages – like the Username / Password boxes. Its “Top Sites” feature is far superior to Firefox or Opera’s Speed Dial. It’s a superbly integrated, fully-featured browser.
But here are my complaints:
1. Too many unsupported web sites. Some sites simply wouldn’t display certain functionality, no matter what features I enabled. I know it’s almost futile to hope for a browser that has 100% support for all sites, but still, with Firefox I find maybe one site per month that I have to open with Internet Explorer. With Safari I had 7 of these sites within a week.
2. Trouble with Joomla’s back-end. I design web sites from time to time, and I do this mostly with Joomla. But I find that Safari has some problems in the Joomla back-end, specifically when uploading media or creating hyperlinks (sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t – and I can’t work with “sometimes”).
3. Some irritating lagging. Often, when opening a new page (not just specific pages, or with specific kinds of content, as far as I can see), Safari would stop responding completely for a few seconds (around 10 – 20 seconds most of the time), totally randomly. This is just plain irritating.
So, no offense to my Apple-supporting readers, but yesterday I exported my bookmarks and moved back to Firefox. No, it doesn’t look as good, and I’m not 100% happy with it. But at least it’s stable, and familiar, and pretty well supported!
So for now, that’s it from me.
Lourens, out.
Aaaaw, nooooo!!! Well, I must admit that I use both Safari and Firefox (approximately equal). One reason for using both is to have multiple google mailboxes open simultaneously.
ReplyDeleteWhat about a post regarding something about mobile devices and what you use to interface with the internet if you do this.
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Interesting. Looks like in the end, large and complex pieces of software like web browsers (ooh, dont forget OSs!) simply are prone to a variety of bugs and non-conveniences. Which is what makes us smart users who can get around that so |_|B3R l33t! W00t! ;-P
ReplyDeleteAs for quirky sites, personally I don't really look at "browsers supporting sites" but at site and browser web standards compliance. International standardization is one of the greatest achievements of human kind, in my opinion, and should be used rigidly for systems to work stabily.
I can't really comment much on other browsers in this regard, beside the progidious MS IE, but excellent standards conformance is what I like about Firefox. At least /that/ is a concrete goal to expect from sites and browsers alike, instead of "all sites working with all browsers all the time".
And things like Linux, the GCC compiler and OpenOffice conforming (or trying) to open and well defined POSIX standards is also one of the things that make me tick. Sorry for the turn in conversation, but my inner engineer just had to express one of the big reasons he likes certain FOSS software. My inner designer would now also like to mention that, after reading this blog entry, he is once again stunned over how simple usability/interface issues often have far greater impact on user experience than the complex algorithms that actually drive the software. Now my inner conversationalist would like to apologize for me posting an overtly long, somewhat philosophical comment once /again/. Ok boys, now shut it and get on with /reading/ posts.