[X4U] One Safari advantage over Firefox..

[DZ-Jay]

On Jan 27, 2006, at 21:16, Mike Panas wrote:

> I find Firefox hard to look at compared to Safari. For me the 
> appearance of the type is just unappealing. Also, some features in 
> Safari don't seem to be in Firefox, like the ability to have a group 
> of sites that open in tabs with one click on the bookmarks bar. I know 
> I can accomplish that is Firefox, but the implementation seems more 
> efficient (requires less effort) in Safari. Can some of you help me 
> understand what unique features are driving you from Safari to 
> Firefox? I'd be interested.
> Mike

I don't see a problem with opening a group of bookmarks in Firefox.  As 
a matter of fact, it seems to work the same was as Safari: you click on 
the "Open in tabs" entry at the end of the Bookmark folder.

There are two main reasons I use Firefox as my default browser (instead 
of just for testing certain sites).  One is because it has a more 
flexible and powerful cookie manager than Safari.  In Safari, I have to 
either accept all cookies, or not accept cookies at all; and even the 
Help file says that if a site requires you to accept cookies, and you 
have it set to block them, that the only recourse you have is to enable 
cookies, visit the site, and then go back and disable them when you're 
done.  This is unacceptable to me, as Firefox lets me accept/reject 
cookies by domain and even gives me the ability to accept them for the 
current session only.

That in itself prevented me from even considering Safari for too long.  
In my opinion, the best thing Safari has going for it is that it is 
blindingly fast, being a core application of MacOS X, while Firefox 
(depending on the extensions you have loaded) can seem bloated.

The other very important reason I use Firefox over Safari (or any other 
browser, for that matter) is the AdBlock extension.  AdBlock allows you 
to create a blacklist of urls, such as images, javascript, flash, 
shockwave, applets, etc, that won't be loaded when opening a page.  
This allows me to surf the web without banner ads, hit counters, and 
plenty of other annoying things.  I understand there's a third party 
plug-in for Safari that can do this, but I have never tried it, and 
AdBlock works fantastically by allowing for wildcard strings and even 
regular expressions, so that you can block something like 
"http://*.doubleclick.*" or "/ads.*", which in itself already blocks 
most of the crap out there.

One other thing that might not be such a necessity, but makes my life 
better in FireFox, is the plethora of tab-manager extensions.  At the 
moment I am using one called Tab Mix Plus, which gives me a high degree 
of flexibility over the use and handling of tabs.  I can, for example, 
set special actions when I double-click or option-click the tab bar or 
an opened tab, customize the context-menu of the tab-bar, or change the 
default behavior of bookmarks or "targetted" links so that they always 
open in new tabs.  Plus it brings with it an "undo" history for tabs, 
so that you can re-opened closed tabs easily -- either from a menu 
list, or by clicking on the tab bar (depending on the actions you set). 
  I combine this with the SessionSaver extension, and I can set 
permanent sessions that will always be there the next time I open the 
browser.  This is infinitely more efficient and convenient than just 
using the History and Bookmarks.

The drawback, as I mentioned above, is that all this extra 
functionality comes in the form of extensions, and therefore incur a 
performance hit on the browser; Firefox might take a few seconds to 
open, and there might even be a noticeable lag when selecting tabs or 
clicking in menus.  For this, even Opera is better than Firefox, which 
contains many of Firefox's best extensions as native functionaility.

But Opera does not have Adblock, and so I stick with Firefox for now.

	dZ.

-- 
"Bastard Operators don't just win.  Anyone can win.  Bastard Operators 
win and totally demoralise.  That's real winning."

	-- BOfH