Sunday, July 19, 2009

My Favorite Browser Still FireFox

Google has launched its Chrome for a while. It was very impressive in terms of its peed and simplicity. I enjoyed it very much. It does have have Mac version and it is still in development stage.

Apple released Safari for Windows for quite a while, but the most impressive version is the recent 4.0. It is speedy fast and has vice nice interface. I like its' Top Sites and History, with Cover Flow Interface. I actually has been used it a lot. For most of my web surfing, I start to use Safari.

However, as a developer, I cannot live without FireFox. The main reason for this is my favorite add-ins: Vimperator and Firebug. In addition to that, its context menu item "See selection source" is very convenient for me just viewing partial source html codes. Safari, on the other hand, does have this choice at all! Therefore, I actually use two browsers most of time. If I cannot get what I get from Safari, I then switch to FireFox. From my experience, I think this is the best choice. Just depending on one browser only is not practical at all. The biggest problem for FireFox is that it does crashes constantly and very slow sometimes(launching at start and loading pages), comparing to Safari. I think this might be caused by Add-ins.

Safari has a list of very convenient short-cut keys. The most keys I used are:

  • Command-L: jump to URL address area
  • Command-W: close tab
  • Command-T: new tab
  • Command-R: refresh tab

With those keys, I can do similar quick actions like I use Vimerator in FireFox. However, one thing is missing in Safari is undo closing tab!

Talking about speed, I found Opera actually very fast in one case. For this web site, vimcolorschemetest, there are some links to lists of vim color schemes, C for example. All those schemes are in frames, with hundreds of frames. I tried with both FireFox and Safari, both are very slow to load all the frames, but Opera is fast! Even though, I rarely use Opera since I can get most from Safari and FireFox.

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