Ease Of Use And Familiarity
Monday April 16th 2007, 4:58 pm
By
Matthew Good
Tags:
Apple,
Browsers,
Camino,
Fire Fox,
Flock,
IE,
OmniWeb,
Opera,
Safari,
User Compatability
I wanted to start out with something practical and simple, and as somewhat of a follow up to Sonny’s recent entry about browsers.
I have been a Mac user for years and have, of course, downloaded and used all of the browsers that Sonny reviewed. One of the most important questions about browser use is not, in my mind, the complexities of its functionality, but the straightforwardness and ease of familiarity that it presents when first used. That factor would be why even though I have Fire Fox, Camino, Flock, Opera, and OmniWeb in my Applications folder, primarily for design reference, I still used Safari as my daily browser. While it has its drawbacks, especially with regards to cross-platform design, I initially found that I understood it better and faster than those previously listed, many of which have copied its traits, though not with as much ease of use. After using the latest version of Internet Explorer all weekend I was relieved to return home and use Safari again simply because it represents to me the origin of the modern browser in many ways, and because of its simplicity is easier to dig into once the basics are cemented.
One of the most interesting aspects of any browser is how much of its capabilities are actually used by regular users. Looking at my Mint statistics, even the use of RSS isn’t as large as one would think it should be, even though RSS integration has become one of the most predominant features on every new browser out there. While it certainly must be said that the likes of Flock, which have possess the built in advantages of integrating social networking platforms right into their browser, such as Flickr and Del.icio.us, it must be taken into consideration the ease with which basic users understand how to go about fully exploiting the capabilities of new browsers. I, myself, am caught in a three way tie between Flock, Camino, and OmniWeb for the title of best third party browser, but as I’ve said, I always defer to Safari because it’s what I know best.
As browsers develop, the ease with which users will be able to manipulate and customize them will become easier to understand. That said, I look forward to see what changes have been made to Safari when Leopard is released this year, and if Apple has made an attempt to stay competitive with those third party browsers that seem to be offering a few more dimensions to their applications.
What’s the best browser for OS X?
After getting increasingly frustrated with the performance of Firefox on my Mac, I decided to try and do an honest evaluation of the top browsers for OS X. At the moment I have five browsers installed on my MBP, Opera, Firefox, Camino, Flock and, of course, Safari.
My evaluation of the following browsers is based on five criteria: support for standards, performance, stability, elegance and plugins. A browser should support the standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium, but it should also be able to handle the latest and greatest web technologies, such as Ajax and advanced Javascript. A browser should be fast. It should load fast, shutdown fast, scroll fast and load pages fast. A browser should be stable. It shouldn’t crash, hang, freeze, lag or show any other kind of unreliable behavior. A browser should be elegant. This is a matter of opinion, so it’s difficult to explain, but what I mean by elegant is how it renders text, images and general layouts. A browser should be user-expandable–a user should be able to write plugins that expand the functionality of a browser. Based on these five criteria and my personal experiences, I have put together a review of the top browsers for OS X. My review is based on user experience, If you’re looking for benchmarks, check out this great post from Macintalk Design. Also note that my review does not include WebKit or OmniWeb, two very promising browsers.
Safari 
Safari is probably the fastest of all the browsers on my Mac, and it’s also the most elegant in terms of its interface and page rendering. Nine times out of ten Safari will do the right thing, and as a mac user (mac evangelist actually) I praise Safari for its elegance as a browser, its speed and its support for standards. However, as a web designer and developer I tend to get frustrated with Apple for building a browser that doesn’t handle the latest web technologies as well as other standards compliant browsers such as Firefox. In fact, once you start to get deep into the heart of technologies like Javascript and Ajax and really pushing the limits of bleeding edge technology, Safari tends to lag, even behind Microsoft (and believe me, as a Mac lover, that’s not an easy thing to say). So while Safari wins on elegance and speed, it loses on the ability to handle complex Javascript. For example, if you’re a power Gmail user like me, Safari is out of the question because Google’s in-browser chat feature doesn’t work on Safari. Safari does have lots of user supported plugins and extra features that can be found at pimpmysafari.com.
Firefox
Firefox is certainly the most expandable browser of the bunch with hundreds of plugins, including the popular Greasemonkey extension, which allows you to customize the way web pages look and function. There are also hundreds of Greasemonkey scripts available at userscripts.org. Firefox is standards compliant, and very elegant. However, Firefox falls short when it comes to performance and stability. When using Firefox for long periods of time and with multiple tabs open, Firefox uses an obscene amount of memory. For instance, right now I have both Firefox and Safari open, Safari is taking up 27MB, Firefox is taking up 115MB (granted I have 4 plugins installed and 13 Greasmonkey scripts running). But even when I disable my extensions (including Greasemonkey) Firefox still takes up over twice the amount of memory that Safari uses (somewhere around 100MB with no extensions and only 5 tabs open). Firefox is also a bit lacking in terms of stability. Every so often, Firefox will crash. Even worse, sometimes when I start Firefox, it will alert me that the last time it was shutdown, it was due to a crash (even though the browser appeared to shutdown properly). If Firefox performed better and was a little more stable, it would be perfect.
Flock 
Flock seems to do better than Firefox in terms of memory consumption, although I haven’t been using it long enough to review its stability. Flock is cut quite literally from the same cloth as Firefox (it uses the same codebase) however, Flock has quite a few built in features. There’s built in support for photo sharing, social bookmarking, blogging and more. So if you’re into having a bunch of your social networking tools available to you in one spot, Flock might be a good choice for you. And because Flock is basically “FIrefox with features,” it supports extensions (including greasemonkey). I’m currently running Flock and Firefox and even though I have the Greasemonkey extension installed with one GM script activated on Flock, it’s still running with less memory (62MB) than Firefox with no extensions (99MB), so the performance is definitely better, but not great.
Camino
The purpose of Camino was to give a user the power of Firefox while maintaining the “awesome visual and behavioral experience that has been central to the Macintosh.” Okay. Camino does better than both Flock and Firefox in terms of memory consumption, it uses roughly 35MB. Camino is fast, and elegant, and if you need extensions, check out pimpmycamino.com, of course. So, if you want the rendering power of Firefox, the speed, performance and elegance of Safari, Camino is a good pick. If you’re a web developer and you gots to have you some Firebug, then Camino sucks for you.
Opera
Opera is fast, although I’m not a big fan of the way it looks and feels on my Mac. There is very little support for extensions and plugins, but it has quite a few features built in, like support for user Javascript (e.g. Greasemonkey), Speed Dial, a feature where users can select their top nine sites and display them as visual favorites available in any new tab, pretty neat. Opera also has a built in mail client, support for widgets, a built in BitTorrent client, an ad blocker, a password manager, an IRC client, plenty of web development tools (although no Firebug support as far as I can tell), a trash can for retrieving accidentally closed tabs and a bunch of other useful features. Opera is on par with Flock in terms of memory usage, but it runs a bit faster. If you’re looking for a “different” kind of browsing experience (i.e. good different), Opera will certainly deliver.
Spoiler
As I stated earlier, Firefox would be perfect if it was less of a resource hog and a smidgen more reliable. Camino provides provides the missing speed, performance and reliability from Firefox, but does so at the expense of less plugin support. Opera is certainly worth downloading and learning more about, but I’m not quite ready to make it my default. Safari is a no go for me because of its lack of support for advanced Javascript and Ajax. Flock is also a no go for me because, while it has some great features, they are features that I’m not necessarily going to use (and while it’s less of a resource hog than Firefox, it’s not THAT much better). So, my overall pick is Camino if you’re not doing any web development, and Firefox if you are.
What’s your favorite browser for the Mac?
