I was an early adopter of Mozilla Firefox. I started using it on Windows before there was a version 1.0 and have stuck with it till now, on my Mac.

Back then there was an undeniably huge feature gap between Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. There were a few other web browsers that never really caught on; I used MYIE2 for a while, tried out Netscape and Opera but finally settled on Firefox. Through the years, Firefox has not ceased to impress me with a slew of smart new features that make everyone’s browsing experience so much more efficient, and in turn enjoyable. Their market share grew rapidly, and more and more of my friends switched to Firefox from the piece of shit that was Internet Explorer.

For obvious reasons, Microsoft realized it needed to do something to stay competitive and released Internet Explorer 7 but I have so far not heard of a single person who uses Firefox that switched back to IE 7, therefore I consider it to be a failure. It was better than IE 6, don’t get me wrong, but Firefox’s open-source nature made it a clear winner in the web browser war over the past few years.

Recently, Google has entered the competition with its Chrome browser, which is currently still only available on Windows. I’ve used it, there are some nice features, but there has still been no port to OS X, so naturally I don’t use it much.

What I haven’t mentioned thus far however is Apple’s Safari, the stock OS X web browsing app. When I bought my MacBook in the summer of 2007, Safari 3 had just been introduced but no sooner was Firefox 3 released and its features just simply outmatched Safari’s. And so since 2007, I’ve used Firefox almost exclusively.

But now we have the beta of Safari 4, the browser I am using to write this article. Having just downloaded it today, being the impulsive must-try-new-Apple-software-fag that I am, I am wholly impressed. Firefox never really amazed me in terms of design, especially on the Mac. It just never really felt like I was still using OS X when I used Firefox. Firefox did however have many sweet new features that I loved (the password management system was superb) but just having used Safari 4 for a bit over an hour now, I’m still finding new features that I love.

Apple is claiming over 150 new features in Safari 4. I’ve only managed to try out a few so far, but I’ve read about some of the others on the Safari web page. I’m glad that Apple has decided to take ideas from Google Chrome, what with the tab bar being incorporated into the main window bar, thus creating that much more (30px or so vertical space) for content, the all new bookmark management system that’s very welcomed considering the old system. The other feature copied from Chrome is what’s called “Top Sites” similar to Chrome’s “Most Viewed” page which is quite handy. I’m also glad that Safari has focused a lot on being compliant with many new standards such as Acid 3 and built-in support for various web plugins. It’s actually compliant with a bunch of things I never even knew existed like CSS Effects and Animation (I should really read up on these things).

Anyway, I could go on and on and try to tell you about the various new features of Safari 4 but if you already managed to read this far, you must be quite bored so I’ll instead leave you with a link to the Safari web page. I don’t know what it’s like on Windows but if you’re on a Mac, I recommend you to try it out for yourself and see if its a worthy competitor for Firefox and/or Chrome. And I’ll just sit here and play around with the features instead of studying for my quizzes next week. All in good time…

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