Tech: Safari vs Firefox1.5: refWrite readers using Macintosh computers with OSX operating systems don't like Safari - why?

Monday, April 03, 2006 (re-posted from page 3)


That's correct. Visitors who come to refWrite's pages to read our unique take on the daily news, whether they come direct from their personal computers, or from referring pages they've visited at other weblogs or websites – if the readers are Mac-based OSXers – they do not use the Mac browser app Safari very often. They instead prefer the Mozilla browser product, Firefox – either Firefox 1.0 or Firefox 1.5.

I'm wondering: why?

refWrite's TechNotes, by Owlie Scowlie:

My uncle Owlb asked me to write up my thawts for the new backpage (refWrite...page 3...now, page 4, of course). Here's what I think. Safari has a problem with its bookmark icon on the bookmark tier just below the address bar and Menu Bar at the top of the browser page. Every click on this convenient icon of an open book crashed Safari over several months until a friend told me he had begun using Firefox yet some more months back. I downloaded Firefox 1.5, and I soon learned the bookmark system (which, once learned, is supriour to that of Safari anyway). Also, besides evading the constant crash problem I was having apparently from this bug, and after sending in many detailed bug reports to Apple, I discovered that Safari was subject to very serious virii. I keep installing the new patches that Apple sends out, maintaining Safari in workable form as much as possible. But Firefox 1.5 is simply much better with its Manage Bookmarks feature.

More than that, Firefox also supports several extension tools that I reallly have come to like. Among these are Linkification which will render URLs in any text as live links you can click on and call up the thus-linked location's page. Also, if you use a JavaScript master extension for Firefox, called by its author "Greasemonkey, you can use a number of further Firefox extensions by the same author one of whose moniker's is "ecmanaut" (just google this name and see what results you get, something of his is bound to interest you). Among the UserScript's he's written to work with Greasemonkey on Firefox 1.5 is a mapper for geotagged Flickr photos, a call-up of CoComment services (once you're enrolled there of course > which refWrite's Semaphore is > see refWrite's frontpage), and you can get your Blogger pages working with tags you maintain in conjunction with your del.icio.us account. This one's a bit more tricky to get working properly, and I haven't yet succeeded in perfecting it for refWrite; but we're on our way.

On several counts, Firefox 1.5 is a superiour browser for the Macintosh operating on OSX 3.9; it's quite better than the apple browser product Safari. But keep an eye-out for improvements down the road from Apple's Safari. I guess that at the moment, Apple is just too busy with iPod. Them's the breaks that but the brakes on Safari's development and perfection, unless of course you've found the version used in conjunction with the new OSX 4.0 and above, to be a winning package displacing Mozilla's Firefox 1.5 browser. Let me know if you've found this further possiblity to be true. - Owlie Scowlie

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technics
computers
apple
mozilla
browsers
safari
firefox

¶ 6:21 PM
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