Time for a respite in the browswer wars, at least for me.
One of my projects over the holidays was evaluating browsers for my iMac and for the Windows XP laptop I use on business trips. The results are now in.
On my recent trip to Newport News, Virginia, to learn some Army-mandated software, I evaluated the PC versions of Opera and Firefox. I like both, but the winner, hands down, was Firefox. Opera has the edge on speed, but Firefox was pretty sprightly, too, and behaved with a bit more stability. So it's Firefox for the laptop.
I had more work to do, and more choices to make, on the Mac system. OS X comes with a fine browser, Safari, and I really have no complaints with it. It can even handle the flavor of the month -- tabbed browsing -- which I was introduced to by Opera, and which I didn't think Safari could do. But it can, so that's a go.
I also spent a lot of time using Opera on the iMac. I liked the look of it, and I loved its speed. But it was a bit unstable, just like its cousin, the Windows version: when a screen would be refreshed, the results weren't quite...perfect.
Besides, I wanted to give the Mozilla teams a shot.
On Mac OS X, you'll actually find two browsers from the Mozilla project: the better-known Firefox, and the Mac-only Camino. I tried Firefox and liked it, so I kept using it. Camino, I thought...well, I'll give it a chance.
Firefox was faster than Safari. Seemed to block more pop-ups. The tabbed browsing was easier. And it was better-looking than Safari. All good things -- and remember, I never disliked Safari. So Firefox got high marks for all that -- and it was more stable than Opera.
So why bother with Camino at all? Well, as I learned, it was all of the above, with a more elegant interface: it just looks, to me, more like an OS X application should look, and the tabbed browsing was nicer-looking and easier. I kept using it more and more each day, and eventually, Camino won out as my choice of Mac browser.
So there you have it: all the votes are in, and it's a sweep for Mozilla -- Firefox for Windows XP, and Camino for Mac OS X.
Posted by Craig Ceely at January 13, 2005 02:29 PM