With the recent release of Chrome for Mac Beta, I’ve decided to gather a little of my own end-user experience for the most popular browsers on the OS X platform and decide which browser is truly the best. Also, I felt it was a fitting topic for my first post considering it includes three of my favourite things: Macs, Google and the internet. Today, I will be covering the main browsers on Mac OS X: Camino, Chrome, Firefox, Flock, Opera, and Safari. All of these have been my default browser at one time or another – because apparently, I’m never satisfied. But the upside to this is that I know most of these very well, inside-and-out.

Camino 2

For those unfamiliar with Camino, it is an open-source browser built on the Gecko engine (the one that Firefox uses), made specifically for OS X.  Since it was built with OS X in mind, it is remarkably speedy and boasts a very mac-like interface to boot. These two features are really the main draw to Camino, because the feature-set of features doesn’t go too far beyond that. With the fairly new release of Camino 2, they’ve added a ‘Tab Overview’ button, which is a neat feature that displays a grid of all of your open tabs in a window. Unfortunately, it’s only accessible by button and not by keyboard shortcut, and therefore becomes a less useful feature for keyboard-oriented users. Another feature lacking from Camino is the ‘drag-to-new-window’ feature that allows users to trag a tab outside of it’s current window, creating a new window or places it in a separate window with other tabs. The bookmarks toolbar does have support for favicons, though the margins between each are so small that it feels cramped and cluttered with only a few bookmarks in there.

Plus Side:

• Fast
• Mac look-and-feel
• Minimal interface
• ‘Tab Overview’

Negative Side:

• No official support for extensions
• No support for url choice on new tab (opens homepage)
• Flash buffering is mediocre
• No searching from address bar
• Not that pretty
• Can’t hide status bar at bottom
• When tab limit is reached, you must scroll to sift through them

Overall: 3/5

Chrome 4 Beta

Now I’m aware that the Chrome beta was just released and you’re probably wondering how I would be able to give it a fair trial. Fortunately, dear readers, I have been using Chrome for Mac for many, many months now through the release channels. Heck, I was even using it when it had no support for Flash or bookmarks (though it supports both now).  Now I’m a big Google fan as much as the next guy and when I use Windows, I stick solely to Chrome – so you can imagine my excitement over the Chrome beta. Unfortunately it landed far below my expectations in testing. Though it has bookmark support, it’s a little unintuitive and there is no bookmark manager as of yet (expected in milestone 5). Another gripe is the abysmal state of *attempting* to run flash on the browser. I’ve never seen anything buffer so slowly. Also, extensions have been excluded from the initial beta, though they are expected to appear eventually (See this post). Getting past all of the negatives of the browser, it is incredibly speedy (though that seems to be a common trend with most any browser nowadays. It’s hard to justify fast when they all go relatively the same speed.), the entire Chrome interface is clean, minimal and fits surprisingly well into the Mac ecosystem. In the future, Chrome will be a strong contender on OS X, but in it’s current implementation, it is nothing but a whimper.

Plus Side:

• Very fast page loads
• Fast start-up
• Clean interface
• Searching from address bar (configurable)
• Fit lots of tabs in one window without scrolling
• Draggable tabs
• Extensions on the way
• If one tab crashes, the others are safe

Negative Side:

• No bookmarks manager
• Poor Flash support
• No task manager for tabs yet
• No extension support yet

Overall: 3/5

Firefox 3.6

Oh Firefox. Where to begin, where to begin. On Windows, Firefox is a masterpiece of open-source software and a testament to it’s capabilities. On OS X, not so much. The issue with Firefox for OS X is that it is essentially a port of the Windows version over to Mac. Because of this, it’s quite slow (and I don’t think I can stress that point enough), takes up a very large chunk of the system’s resources (and I mean very large) and has a fairly ugly – and large – interface.

You see the graph to the right? That’s my system’s CPU (2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo). The large spikes on the left of it indicate when Firefox is running with a reasonable amount of tabs open (three). As soon as it drops down to near nothing, that’s when I had quit the Firefox application. This is a very big problem and it can only get worse, the more tabs and extensions you add on to it. Speaking of which, extensions are a big plus and Firefox has a gigantic community of developers constantly developing and updating them. Unfortunately, they just slow the system down, though I found I could get it to run at a decent speed with two or three extensions installed – as long as I wasn’t trying to multitask with any other applications.

Plus Side:

• Huge community
• Lots of extensions
• Customizable

Negative Side:

• Slow page loads
• Slow start-up
• Resource hog
• Poor interface

Overall: 2/5

Flock 2.5

In short, Flock is Firefox with social media built-in. When I say social media, I’m referring to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Blogger, etc. In reality, it is quite a neat browser and if you frequent those sites, it is definitely worth a look. The Flock interface includes a collapsible sidebar that aggregates all of your friends’ status updates, pictures, videos and more. Also, they’ve built in the Facebook chat bar (found on the bottom of Facebook’s site) to the actual browser, so it’s with you everywhere you go. All in all, Flock is a solid browser with a robust feature set. Where it falls short is with extension/theme support and a large, clunky interface (which you’re bound to have with so much content).

Plus Side:

• Range of features (Social media integration, RSS reader, email client, blog editor and more)
• Search from address bar

Negative Side:

• Mediocre speed
• Large interface
• Not very “mac-like”
• No extension support

Overall: 3.5/5

Opera 10

Opera is quite a remarkable browser that deserves much more attention than the media gives it. The Opera browser has been around since 1996 (13 years!) and is one of the most innovative and robust option out there. A key feature of Opera is Opera Turbo, which helps speed up loading times for users with slow internet connections by compressing the page. Opera will also sync all of your bookmarks, notes, Speed Dial (a grid of  your favourite websites that opens with a new tab), as well as other useful information. A feature just released with the most recent update (10.10) is called Opera Unite and it is an extremely powerful new feature that has helped Opera set record downloads for their browser since its release. Essentially, it turns your computer into a server and allows you to host your own website, share files of any size, stream media from one computer to another – all because the data is being sent from your computer and isn’t being stored on Opera’s own servers. The two problems with this (of course, nothing’s perfect) is that the browser must remain open for people to access the data over Unite and the transfer is a little on the slow side (but I’m sure that depends on your own internet connection). The main issue I’ve found with Opera is it’s page rendering ability. Opera has no support for rounded corners and has quite a few quirks when loading pages. Also, I’ve been experiencing crashes when playing any flash video, though I think that’s related to the Click-To-Flash plugin, and not something inherent to Opera.

Plus Side:

• Fast
• Opera Turbo
• Sync across computers
• Self-hosted server (Opera Unite)
• Mail client
• Visual tabs
• Speed Dial

Negative Side:

• Odd rendering of pages
• Poor drop-down in address bar

Overall: 4/5

Safari 4

Safari is the default Mac browser so I’m sure many of you have experiences with it. I used to feel that Safari was a featureless, annoying browser but recently, I’ve taken a liking to it – mostly thanks to an extension called Glims. On its own, Safari is a stable, fast browser that fits right into the Mac interface. Such a good-sounding browser is not without its problems though. Safari likes to open links in new windows and though there is a terminal command to stop that, it forces links that should open in new windows to open in tabs. Safari is also not very extensible and allows for very little interface customization. Also, it doesn’t allow searching through the address bar to sites like Google or Yahoo, unlike most of it’s competitors (though this is fixed with Glims).

Plus Side:

• Very fast
• Stable
• Great flash support
• Simple interface
• Web-clips to make widgets

Negative Side:

• No official extension support
• Odd link handling
• Not very customizable

Overall: 4/5

Round-Up

Camino: 3/5

Chrome: 3/5

Firefox: 2/5

Flock: 3.5/5

Opera: 4/5

Safari: 4/5

Winner: Safari

It’s hard to truly say which browser is best because they’re very personal things and each user requires something different out of it. As it stands, I believe that Safari is the most stable, secure browser for the platform and with Glims installed, it becomes a powerful tool that propels it to the top of the browser wars.

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