Firefox vs. Safari vs. Chrome

These days, browsers are a big part of your everyday life; everyone goes on the internet to check their email, to watch their favorite videos, to communicate, and lots more. And everyone uses a web browser, often times Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla FireFox. But, those aren’t your only choices, and there are some other browsers that are very stable, powerful, and quick.

In my opinion, Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 is, at the moment, not worth mentioning. It is a very slow browser, and all of its features are dull, and some copied from other browsers. Therefore the only browsers I will be talking about are Mozilla firefox, Apple Safari, and Google Chrome.

Firefox is an all time favorite for everyone from PCs to Macs and Linux distributions. Firefox is a very stable browser that is both quick and filled with features. Firefox 3, which hopefully everyone has downloaded already, comes with a major new feature called the “awesome” bar. In my opinion, this is a major new renovation; I can just type a short word and the awesome bar will immediately come up with a website. For example, if I type in “dashboard” it’ll bring up my wordpress dashboard, so I can quickly get to it. You may say, why not just bookmark it and put it on the bookmarks menu; while it is true that the bookmarks menu is a quick way of accessing your favourite websites, what if you have tens, or hundreds of websites you visit daily? Scrolling down lists of bookmarks is very irritating, especially when you are looking for one thing. Instead of doing that, the awesome bar does it for you by searching through your history. If you’ve bookmarked a site, you’ll notice that bookmarks will come before sites you haven’t bookmarked. Bookmarking them makes it quicker for the awesome bar to find them.

Firefox’s interface is one that I like tremendously. In all 3 distributions of Firefox for Windows, Mac, and Linux, Firefox retains the same theme and idea with the awesome bar and the search menu. However, in each distribution, there are different looks as well. For example, the Windows version of Firefox retains the look of FireFox 2 but puts firefox 3’s icons in there. In the Macintosh version, Firefox finally looks like a program native on the Mac; it now has a more Safari look, unlike firefox 2, which looks more like the PC version.

And the Linux distribution looks EXACTLY like Firefox 2, and you won’t even notice it is FireFox 3 until you use the awesome bar. And of course, there are hundreds of Firefox themes to pick from on their website, which is one of the best reasons to pick Firefox. Because of all the add ons and themes available, it gives firefox the ability to expand indefinitely by hundreds of developers working on it.

Firefox’s rendering engine is also very powerful, but doesn’t use up a lot of CPU. When loading large images and other demanding internet applications, Firefox 3 does not use a large percent of the CPU, but still retains its ability to load very quickly. And this brings us over to Apple Safari.

Apple Safari is a web browser introduced a couple of years back for the Mac, and it was released for Windows some time later. Today, Safari is a very developed and fast browser that is available for the Mac and PC. And there are many features of Safari that are extremely useful, such as the ability to take tabs out of a window. This is a confusing thing to describe, but an example helps. If you have a Safari window open with 2 tabs, you can drag one of the tabs off of the window and form its own window. I find this extremely useful while organizing web browsing; it lets you keep certain websites to certain windows and use them at different times. You can also merge Windows together using the same way.

Safari is a Mac native application, and is more integrated with Mac OS X because of that. And the Windows version lacks some features compared to the Mac version simply because it isn’t integrated with Windows. And also, the Safari version for Windows is much slower than the Mac version; the load time of Safari is slower. However, once open, it runs just as quick as the Mac version, and uses the powerful Webkit rendering engine to load websites.

Safari lacks the awesome bar, but has a feature called “save to web receipt” which basically takes a snapshot of the website you are on and saves it to a folder onto your hard drive in PDF format. This is extremely useful for when you purchase items online and you want to keep copies of the receipt a website generates, but you don’t want to print it out either, which could cause you to lose it. Safari saves this onto your hard drive, and you can easily access it from there.

However, Safari has some major drawbacks. Compared to Firefox 3, Safari uses a MUCH larger percent of the CPU when loading intensive stuff. And because of that, Safari generates more heat on the Mac than Firefox 3 does, which is a very bad thing because with more heat, the computer has to slow down the clock speed of the CPU in order to remain functioning. This makes using Firefox 3 more reasonable than Safari; Safari is simply a browser filled with great ideas, but does not work as well in its core functions.

And lastly, Google Chrome. This web browser, which only came out recently, has an aura of curiosity surrounding it already; it is one of the few Google products that is not in beta. And using the browser, you can easily see why. Chrome has an awesome bar similar to the one in Firefox 3, except it also incorporates the search bar into it as well, so you don’t have to click on the search bar to search something. Also, Chrome has the excellent Safari features of dragging tabs around, and also uses the powerful Webkit rendering engine.

Google Chrome for Mac is still under development, but I am eagerly waiting for it, because after using the Windows version, Chrome feels like a combination of the good parts of Firefox 3 and Safari 3. However, the Mac version is not released, so I cannot say how much CPU it uses compared to Safari and Firefox. Until the Mac version is released, I cannot give a full opinion of it, but the Windows version of Google Chrome is a very excellent browser, faster than Firefox, and gives the many good features of Safari.

Chrome has a rather weird download manager; instead of your traditional list of downloads, it downloads something and shows the progress in a bar at the bottom of the Window. After the download is complete, clicking on the item will open it. However, in the Windows version, I have not been able to configure where downloads are downloaded to, which is very annoying because I like the ability to control that. Hopefully, the Mac version will be able to choose!

In conclusion, the best browser for Windows users is probably Google Chrome. And for Mac and Linux users, go for Firefox. Safari unfortunately is still under developed, and Apple seems to be focusing more on other markets. Perhaps Safari 4 will amend for what Safari 3 lacks, but only time will tell.