Confessions of a Mac Junkie: Web Browsers

At any given time, I probably have five or six Web browsers on my hard disk. I’ll look at and briefly play with just about anything floating around, or at least I used to—this is one area that I’ve slowed down on a little bit. But why bother playing with Web browsers? Because this is one of the most important pieces of software on the machine—who doesn’t have a Web browser open most of the time? Anything that commands as much of my time as a Web browser deserves some attention in terms of looking for the best one.

The fundamental problem, despite the fact that so much development time and effort goes into these—or maybe because of that—I don’t think there’s a clearly “best” Web browser out there, which is unfortunate. Fundamentally, I spend most of my time using three different browsers.

The first is OmniWeb. This is the browser in which I tend to spend most of my time. It’s not especially fast, it’s buggy and crashes more than it should, and it has occasional issues with compatibility with some Web sites. After that ringing endorsement, why is this one of my favorites? Because it has two things that it does better than other Web browsers:

• Site-specific settings. If you want some web sites to behave one way while other web sites to behave differently, then you want site-specific settings. Here’s an example: on most sites, when I click a link, I want it to go to that link in the current browser tab. However, for some sites, I want all links to launch in a new tab (or window). For example, when I do a search in Google, I want all the links to launch in new tabs so I don’t have to go back to the original search. For some sites I want to block all images, and in others I want to permit all images. OmniWeb not only allows for this, but makes it easy to do.

• Thumbnail tabs. Tabs with text titles aren’t really all that helpful, as they depend on Web sites to have meaningful and differentiable titles, and reading titles is slow anyway. If you want tabs that really work well, thumbnails are the way to go. There are plugins for other browsers which give something like this, but OmniWeb has been it doing it from the ground up for a long time and has implemented it in a much more smooth and fluid way. Like this:

Untitled.NiuiKcRZQmg9.jpg

When there’s only a single tab open, the drawer closes automatically, so it doesn’t eat up the screen space when you don’t want it to. It’s really well done.

The next browser is Safari. Particularly with Safari 4, this is a speed demon that renders most web sites quite well, and it does have some great bells and whistles, too, like the Firebug-like inspector (which I actually like better than FireBug itself). Safari is what I generally run whenever OmniWeb has trouble with a site.

The other thing that WebKit-based browsers on the Mac have is the completely awesome ClickToFlash plugin. What does this do? I’ll quote from the site: “ClickToFlash is a WebKit plug-in that prevents automatic loading of Adobe Flash content. If you want to see the content, you can opt-in by clicking on it or adding an entire site to the whitelist.” Mostly I think of Flash as the scourge of the web. Yes, sure, occasionally Flash is cool, but most Flash is just annoying, and most Flash videos are really crappy quality. Plus Flash is a stunning resource hog. Having all Flash off by default, but still available when you want it, is terrific. This makes it hard for any non-Webkit browser to get very far with me.

Speaking of non-Webkit browsers, the third most oft-launched browser for me is FireFox. Basically, I keep this around to deal with Web sites that have obviously never been tested on a WebKit browser on a Mac. Since FireFox is common enough in the Windows world, it can handle the few sites that I have to deal with that the Mac/WebKit system don’t handle well. Those sites are decreasing in frequency, so I don’t use it all that often anymore. This is fine with me, as I dislike FireFox it for its non-Mac-like interface. There are some cool plugins for FireFox, but now that Safari has out-FireBug’d FireBug, I rarely feel the need to play around with those.

What about others like iCab, Camino, Opera, Chrome, etc.? Each of them has interesting features, but there are always problems with bugginess or inability to render many pages or something. The best of the lot of others seems to be Opera, but it just doesn’t offer anything compelling to take me away from the other choices. Now, I haven’t played with the beta for version 10 yet, so maybe it now does, but I don’t have a sense of this yet.

My default browser is usually set to OmniWeb, but Safari is increasingly also running…