Wither Safari

I don’t like Safari. There, I said it. It’s too slow, now to the point of being completely unusable. I’ve tried clearing the cache, deleting favicons, and I’ve just had enough. A browser, especially on the Mac, shouldn’t need this much care and feeding. I haven’t opened the thing in weeks.

Am I using Firefox? No. While it’s my browser of choice on Windows, it looks like ass on the Mac. It doesn’t use Mac widgets, and the whole interface is so very un-Mac-like. No no no no. I use a Mac so I don’t have to think about how each program wants me to interact with it. Firefox on the Mac is terrible.

So what about Camino? It uses the same rendering engine as Firefox, and it’s wrapped in a nice Mac shell. Wellllll, no. It’s closer to what I’m looking for than what Firefox is, but not quite there. Some of the behaviour is not quite Mac-like. For example, for some reason they’re not using standard text-input boxes. Most well-written Mac apps have built-in spellchecking, provided by the system. Not Camino. Bzzt. Next?

Internet Explorer? Don’t make me laugh. Opera? Come ON. iCab was great in OS9, but it’s not so good in X.

The one I’m using right now is OmniWeb. It uses WebKit (aka KHTML), same as Safari, but it’s actually fast . It works really well. It’s got the only version of “tabbed browsing” that doesn’t completely nauseate me (little pictures of each page in a sidebar drawer). The RSS reader needs a bit of work, but I don’t do that much anyway. It’s a commercial product, but I’m considering sending in my hard-earned cash once the trial is up.

I’d have already sent in my money if it wasn’t for the Shiira Project, a new open-source browser that uses WebKit too. Very interesting. I’ll be giving it a whirl over the next few days and see how it goes. It ought to render things as well as Safari, and hopefully be lean and mean, like OmniWeb.