Safari or Firefox?

So I’ve been using Firefox as my primary Mac browser for a while now. It seemed a little faster than Safari, and it had the huge advantage of developers tools like Firebug and the Web Developer add-on. I can’t live without those. Heck, you can’t even use StumbleUpon properly since Safari doesn’t support toolbars.
But then I noticed yesterday that I had Safari set to run in Rosetta mode — which makes it run as a PowerPC app, necessary if you want to run Shockwave. At least until an Intel-compatible version of Shockwave comes out. So I would run Safari if I needed to view some Shockwave content.
I turned off Rosetta mode and was amazed at how much faster the Leopard version of Safari was. It now blows away Firefox. Plus, Firefox 2 (2.0.0.9 and 2.0.0.10) are really starting to piss me off with their instability. I have to quit and restart several times a day once pages become unresponsive. Typically, this happens when you have buggy Add-Ons. But I’ve had it happen to me even with all Add-Ons disabled.
So, unfortunately, I need to continue to use both browsers. But I think I’ll be using Safari a lot more.
Which Mac browser do you use? Anyone have suggestions for hacks that can bring Firebug-like capabilities to Safari? The Safari debug menu doesn’t seem to have nearly enough.

Posted on November 30, 2007 at 10:09 am by Gary Rosenzweig · Permalink
In: General