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The largest dilemma I continue to face coming from Windows to OS X is an ideal web browser. For Windows users, it’s an obvious choice, Firefox. It’s fast, it’s got tabs, extensions, themes, inline searching, spell checking, you can even run IE as a tab within Firefox, it has everything. Why would you use anything else? 

The situation is quite different for OS X. There’s no perfect web browser. I’ve been chopping and changing since first switching. Every browser has it’s positives and negatives but none really fufill all my needs alone. To help you weigh up the your browser decision, here’s a run down of 11 different browsers for OS X.

Safari

Rendering Engine WebKit
Cost Free with OS X

The OS X default. Personally I craved a brilliant default browser, I wanted Safari to be really, really good and it is, apart from one small problem. It doesn’t support Javascript WYSIWYG editors, like the one used in WordPress. A few WP versions ago it wouldn’t even show quicktags. I use the WYSIWYG editor daily so this was unacceptable, despite otherwise being a very nice browser.

Positives

• Speed, one bounce startup
• Typically lovely user interface
• Lovely smooth scrolling
• Good OS integration. Use your address book card to fill out forms, etc

Negatives

• WebKit has some strange quirks
• Non support for JS WYSIWYG ediors

Firefox

Rendering Engine Gecko
Cost Free

While Firefox is wonderful on a PC, on a Macintosh it’s slow, it crashes and it’s not very “Mac-like”. It still has all the great features, inline searching, extensions and spell checking but it’s just plain slow. On my not-so-slow Core Duo Macbook with a gig of RAM it can take over 15 seconds to open. I was living with the slow boot time for a long time because just leaving it open avoided that problem. Then it started to crash, I’d lose multiple tabs, posts, comments, etc. It was crashing up to 5 times a day when I finally let it go.

The other thing Mac users tend to complain about is the lack of “Macness”. It uses it’s own widgets (aka Windows widgets) for things like search inputs and buttons. They’re ugly.

Positives

• Inline search and spell checking
• Themes
• Extensions
• Rapid Development

Negatives

• Very slow startup time
• Not stable - crashes often
• Not Mac-like

Camino

Rendering Engine Gecko
Cost Free

Camino, all the negatives of Firefox removed but at the same time all the positives of Firefox removed. Camino has fixed the speed, crashing and Mac-like problems of Firefox but at the same time it’s lacking nearly all the features that make Firefox great. There’s no inline search, there’s no spell checking and even though it’s built on top of Firefox, it’s unable to use the library of Firefox extentions such as FireBug.

There are some customisation options though, as well as some extensions. These are available though Pimp my Camino. I’m currently using a slightly customised version of Camino.

Positives

• It’s Fast
• It’s pretty, it’s Mac like
• It’s never crashed during my use.

Negatives

• None of Firefox’s extensions
• No inline search
• No spell checking

Bon Echo

Rendering Engine Gecko
Cost Free

Intel and PPC-specific builds of Firefox, called Bon Echo, are supposed to fix the speed problem of Firefox under OS X. As it is an unofficial build of the Firefox codebase it must use a different icon and name. It is extremely young, only an Alpha 1 so many things still don’t work. Things went nuts for me when I tried to run Bon Echo and Firefox side by side. It got confused about which was my default browser and I ended up losing a lot of bookmarks. Bon Echo really isn’t an option yet.

Positives

• A bright future

Negatives

• Basic functionality is broken or missing
• Messes with your Firefox installation

Flock

Rendering Engine Gecko
Cost Free

Flock is another browser built on top of Firefox. It calls itself the social web browser because of additional web application support for blogging and photo sites like Flickr and Photobucket. Flock is pretty good, it’s fast, it supports nearly all of the Firefox extensions, it looks good and the social features are handy.

I used Flock for a little while before little things got to me. Things like the text label inside the tabs not being vertically centered would slowly annoy me. As well as a crazy bookmarking system that doesn’t support folders. Strangly enough a broswer built on top of Firefox is unable to import bookmarks from Firefox, I had to export to Safari and then import from Safari into Flock.

Positives

• Firefox’s features while staying fast
• Some nice addon “social” features

Negatives

• Some small details like text alignment
• Bad bookmark organisation
• Unable to import from anywhere but Safari

Opera

Rendering Engine Presto
Cost Free

People that use Opera swear by it. It is proprietry software and up until recently it wasn’t free or it had a permanent advertisment built into the interface. Opera tends to roll it’s own way, it uses it’s own rendering engine and adds some unusual features such as fast forward and rewind buttons. It even has it’s own widgets, much like Dashboard widgets that I can only see getting in the way. On OS X the interface seems a little clumsy and a little overdone when compared to something like Safari.

Positives

• Many extras, built-in features
• Widgets
• Lots of community features like my.opera

Negatives

• It’s own rendering engine is sometimes a little strange
• No real web development features

Omniweb

Rendering Engine WebKit
Cost $14.95

Omniweb is the only non-free browser on the list. It is packed with features, loaded with them and heaps of options. It does a few things a little differently, perhaps better. Tabs are displayed in a shelf with page thumbnails. This kind of helps with quick recognition. I say kind of because the thumbnails are so small that if you have two websites with white backgrounds, it’s not that easy to tell them apart. There’s always the option to keep them text based.

Another feature that sets it apart is the workspaces feature. You can save windows and websites in a certain format as a workspace. You can drag tabs from workspace to workspace and even open them in a new window, which is nice. It uses the WebKit engine so it doesn’t display JS WYSIWYG editors either.

Positives

• Truckloads of options
• Builtin ad blocking
• Graphical tabs
• Workspaces

Negatives

• Clumsy interace
• Lack of JS WYSIWYG editor support
• A $14.95 price tag

Shiira

Rendering Engine WebKit

Shiira is trying to “create a browser that is better and more useful than Safari”. The current stable, 1.2.2, is quite bland. It’s Safari with an uglier, less polished interface and no extra features. The 2.0 beta has features somewhat similar to OmniWeb, a shelf and graphical tabs. It also has a widescreen kiosk mode, I have no idea where this would actually be useful but you know, whatever.

Advantages

• See Safari
• A Pretty Icon

Disadvantages

• See Safari
• An interface not quite as pretty as Safari’s

The Others

Not so different, not so amazing and not real options.

Desk Browse

Rendering Engine WebKit
Cost Free

When I first saw DeskBrowse I thought it looked very nice. It was refreshing to see a browser finally go for the address bar and the primary controls positioned under the webpage. Then I tried to move it off the side of the screen. No, you can’t do that. The fact it’s stuck to the side of your screen is what’s so “revolutionary” about Deskbrowse. There’s two hot keys that slide the window off to the side and into full screen mode. Both useless.

Netscape

Rendering Engine Gecko and Trident
Cost Free

You would think that in ten years and 4 versions, Netscape would have improved, it hasn’t, even the interface is almost the same as Netscape 4. All this browser is good for is bringing back memories.

Internet Explorer for Mac

Rendering Engine Tasman
Cost Free

In it’s day it lead the way in web standards. If only IE for Windows took any notice of it. Today, Microsoft do not support it nor offer it for download. Humorously, it supports folders in the bookmarks bar, something even Flock doesn’t. While it’s useless these days it still has a lovely icon and the best name for a web browser out of them all.

Every browser for Mac OS X has it’s positives and it’s negatives, some cancel each other out like Firefox and Camino. While you could easily use one browser for some tasks, another for other tasks and create a complete solution that way, it’s hardly ideal. When there is a complete solution on the Windows platform, with Firefox, it makes you feel like you’re missing out.

Source: http://brisbanecreative.com/home/39/ (you can read interesting comments on the source about this article and we recommend strongly to read the comments of this article)