I happened across an interesting post by Chris Coyier recently: The Safari Challenge. Besides being a creative example of the “blogazine” concept, it sums-up an issue that has been bothering me lately. Should I be using Firefox or Safari?
I’ve traditionally been a Firefox guy. I like Firefox. I like the peeps at Mozilla, and they do great things. I also like Apple, and when I can, I try to use Apple products. So for an entire week, I decided I was going to suck it up and just try and make the switch to using Safari as my main web browser. No going back and forth, no half-assing it. All-or-nothing. Some people claim to be able to use different web browsers for different things. Not me, I can’t do that. I can’t even have more than one pair of shoes without getting confused.
I, too, have long been a Firefox user. I’ve liked the browser ever since it was first released back in 2004. It’s still my primary browser, even since becoming a full-time Mac user. There are several extensions that I depend on, such as the veritable Firebug.
But it just seems so slow. All of its major competitors are now so much faster than the browser that single-handedly put an end to Microsoft’s decade of browser domination. What went wrong? Why isn’t it being rectified?
Safari is a great browser, but I can’t give up functionality for the speed, however tempting it may be.
Chris’s title, The Safari Challenge, is more apt than he probably thought. That is the very challenge Mozilla faces: to catch up to the speed of Safari and Chrome. Hopefully it will be soon.
