Is it time to ditch Safari?

Apple is very good at making streamlined simple-to-use-software. There are many Apple products that are among my favorites - iCal, Pages, Keynote, GarageBand to name a few. One notable exception is Safari. Apple - I’ve had enough of Safari, okay? I’m ditching it.

What’s wrong with Safari?
Truth is, I only have one complaint about Safari. Problem is, that one complaint I’m fed up with. It gives me too many spinning beachballs. When I’ve had many pages open, sometimes it has quite literally taken 5 minutes to switch to Safari. Yes, I have timed it. I’ve even made a cup of coffee - including boiling the kettle - while I’ve waited. Sometimes Safari will chug away in the background sucking 20% CPU for no apparent reason. I know beachballs might belong on a surfing safari, but there’s no place for them web surfing on Safari.

What are the options
I didn’t have my whole life to compare browsers and options, so have just selected the two major free alternatives - Firefox and Opera. Yes, if you haven’t heard, Opera is now free. The big four in browsers for OS X are Safari, Firefox, Opera and Omniweb and on Version Tracker have the following ratings (out of 5):
- Safari 4.0 (all time)
- Firefox 3.9 (all time)
- Opera 4.3 (current version as previous versions had lower rating due to not being free)
- Omniweb  3.95 (without price rating)

I am aware there are others (eg Camino, Shiira, iCab) but having reviewed the comments by users on Version Tracker, it appeared they had some key issues with rendering and speed. But keep your eye on them, because they do show a lot of promise.

Through experiencing not too dissimilar problems with my news aggregator, NetNewsWire, when having many pages open in it, I have concluded the performance problem is something to do with Apple’s WebKit which is what Safari and NetNewsWire use. So that also ruled Shiira out. With OmniWeb costing money and having also read the comments on Version Tracker about it, I wasn’t convinced it presented any compelling reason to pay money for a browser, so haven’t considered it either.

Firefox
I had been using Firefox for sometime with one particular banking site that doesn’t like Safari, and also for analysing web pages using its Web Developer toolkit extension. Extensions not surprisingly (given Firefox being Open Source), are its greatest advantage.

On the down side with more intense usage I found it somewhat unstable, with two severe crashes, one which caused an exceptionally rare Windows style domino hang. That is, where one application hangs and even though you Force Quit it, others start to follow, including the Finder until the only option is a cold reset (hold the power button in until the computer turns off). At that point I ditched Firefox as a viable alternative.

Another big problem is it doesn’t import Safari bookmarks - I couldn’t even find an Extension to do that. This should be a mandatory feature as the biggest pain in switching browsers is re-creating bookmarks.

Opera
Opera has been around for many years and has developed a good reputation but was always let down by being adware (although you could pay for an ad-free version). Fortunately the folks who make Opera have finally relented and it is now available at no cost.

Some niceties of Opera quickly became apparent. Some I liked are being able to import Safari’s bookmarks; the Window menu shows all open pages in all browser windows (unlike Safari which just shows the current one in each open browser window); tabs can be re-ordered via drag and drop; and on starting, you can have Opera re-open all the pages you previously had open.

Opera’s ability to remember what pages you had open (which NetNewsWire also does) is an excellent feature. After the cold reset mentioned earlier, on restarting Opera, up came the 29 pages I had open. Very, very appreciated.

Things I didn’t like are it’s difficult to get news feeds to be added to a third party news aggregator; some key sequences are different to Safari such as Command-N to open a new tab rather than Safari’s Command-T (which Firefox also utilizes); and occasionally page loading stall near the end.

Opera has at times been using 4 to 10% CPU for no apparent reason but unlike Safari, this has not impacted system performance, and there’s been no beachballs. Considering this anomaly, the likely reason is that when Safari is problematic, it is doing considerable paging to the hard disk.

But the biggest problem I’ve encountered with Opera is sometimes it does not redraw the browser window when you are scrolling. Restarting it clears the problem but it does return in time. (Yet again I appreciated Opera remembering which pages I had open) Without this problem, Opera would have been my favorite browser by a wide margin.

Visually, Firefox and Opera are left in the dust by Safari’s clean and simple interface. But with some customization of the toolbars I was able to get Opera looking very much like Safari. The skin I used is Joergs_Safshiirad_mac

Being able to make Opera visually appealing also improved my enjoyment of using it.

To switch or not to switch?
It is interesting looking at those Version Tracker ratings again, as they fit with my experience too. Firefox and Safari are good but I’ve become enamored with Opera despite the window refresh problem - which interesting only began occurring today after I thought I had this review all wrapped up. Murphy’s Law!

So it comes down to a choice between beachballs and manual refreshes. I’m going to go with the manual refreshes.

Opera will be my primary browser from now on. As I do develop a few websites for myself I will continue to use Firefox for checking structures etc on other sites. Safari? It will be hard to let go. If it wasn’t for Safari’s beachballs, I wouldn’t even have considered switching. So I’ll keep it around and give each new version a spin.

Note to Apple
Besides the performance issue, features Safari could add to entice me back are:
- Remembering open pages on restart
- List all open pages on the Window menu
- Improved RSS viewing eg a three pane layout like NetNewsWire does
- An optional dialog box on downloads asking where to save
- Draggable tabs

As a Mac user, Safari should be the browser of choice, but for me, Opera now is.