eugene gordin

No, this post isn’t going to be about making the (amazing) switch from PCs to Macs. Apple does a good job advertising that on its own. In a way, you could say that this switch represented the final step in my PC de-shackling, but since I have to use Parallels quite often for Engineering stuff, that final step is quite a bit off.

This post is about the switch I made a few months back from Mozilla’s Firefox to Apple’s Safari.

In the months leading up to my switching to Safari as my full time browser, I became increasingly frustrated with Firefox, in terms of usability and speed. Each time that I opened a code-intensive webpage, I would get the spinning beach ball for long periods of time (up to 15 seconds), which is simply unacceptable.

On the other hand, whenever I would load any page in Safari, it would load extremely quickly, never crashing or stalling at any given turn.With the release of Safari 3 (with Leopard), I was fully hooked. The interface, speed (see graph), stability, and plugins provide everything I need for my browser. The inline search is gorgeous, and quite useful.

The transition from Firefox was eased even more by installing three separate (and free!) plugins, which I could simply not browse without.

• SafariBlock – its basically AdBlock Plus for Safari (highly recommended!)
• Inquisitor – allows you to add multiple search engines to Safari’s Google search, in addition to providing search suggestions (note: sometimes sponsored ones)
• Greasekit – brings the power of GreaseMonkey to Safari (although not all scripts are compatible)
• Saft – provides a whole HUGE list of improvements and tweaks, specifically proper “open links in new tabs” for Gmail and the like (note: this one isn’t free, but it also isn’t as necessary)

So ignore my previous posts about the power of Firefox (even on PCs since Safari is now available for Windows). Safari is the way to go, and I highly recommend you try it for yourself. The speed alone should be a pleasant surprise.