very impressed with Firefox for Mac

I've been using Firefox on my Windows machine at work for the last month. I'm not surprised that it runs circles around that pathetic excuse for a browser that's loaded with Windows XP. If you're a Windows user, there is absolutely no excuse not to try Firefox - unless you're not allowed to. You will be kicking yourself for every day that you put it off.

What does surprise me is how well Firefox compares with the other Mac browsers. Yesterday I downloaded it for my iBook and I can say that the Mac version doesn't disappoint. It's very fast, both to load and to use, it has tabs (of course) and most helpfully for me, supports rich text editing which allows me to do WYSIWYG updating of this blog in TypePad (neither Opera nor Safari offer this feature).

I've pretty much decided that I'll be using Firefox on my Mac most of the time. The other two browsers aren't bad. Safari is also very quick but I still don't like its brushed metal interface and don't use many of its unique .Mac related features. Opera 7.5 takes longer to load than both Safari and Firefox, but because I have it, I'll still use Opera when I'm about to start a heavy-duty web searching session. Its keyboard shortcuts are marginally better than Firefox's and allow for faster searching, and it's nice to be able to take those snapshots of browsing sessions and be able to retrieve them at a later time. But for casual browsing, Firefox is more than enough.

The table below compares the main three Mac browsers as I see them. I'm not including Internet Explorer 5.2 (a browser without tabs or pop-up blocking and hasn't received a major update in over 4 years is a waste of my time), Netscape 7.1 (better than IE, but bloatware when compared with its cousin Firefox) or OmniWeb 5 (sorry).

	Firefox	Opera	Safari
Gmail support
Load speed	close 2nd	distant 3rd	1st
.Mac support built-in
Power-search features	close 2nd	1st	3rd
Price	Free	Ad-supported / $US 39	Free
Rich text editing
Tabbed Browsing