'Browser wars' are just dumb!
Julie, newish to Macs and happy with Jaguar, has asked me about Safari, fiddling with "Safari extras" and what else I thought she could download apart from Internet Explorer. "Lots," I replied. "Try these and see."
To read many Mac sites and especially forums, you'd think it was almost all about speed. Apple proudly put this graphic on its Safari home, comparing the time in seconds it takes its new browser to open, well, I don't know which page(s) on an iMac (800MHz PowerPC G4, GeForce4 MX GPU, 256MB RAM), along with an ad for Amazon. OK, that's neat. So are other features like the way it sorts its bookmarks and the "tabbed browsing" to come. But so what? If that were all there was too it...
When it comes to tussles, I'd rather argue about things like Bill Gates's action on AIDS (and the trouble it got him into in India last year). Or why you can now find Windows all over Africa, while Macs are very rare. This is a most interesting story that Philip Machanick told me last year before he left South Africa for Australia. In essence, it stems largely from Apple's scruples about dealing with the apartheid regime at a crucial time when computers were working their way up a large chunk of the continent, unshared by Microsoft. And with inappropriate sales policies after that. Or whether Apple is doing what it needs to today in education.
 My working day starts with iCab, set up just how I want it to get, and print, the news. But either iCab's handling of style sheets is not yet up to this site of mine, or I still haven't got it right. For "working" here, I'm happiest with Camino, several tabs open. For general browsing, it's that or Safari, in conjunction with a newsreader. But I like Omniweb too, with rumours abounding of a potential switch to the "Safari engine" since last month's OSNews interview with CEO Ken Case.
Internet Explorer rarely gets a look-in on my machine now. It would be gone forever, mainly "on principle", not because it's a bad browser. I once used its increasingly redundant "album" feature often to save the odd useful page otherwise destined to disappear forever. For a while longer, I want to keep an eye on whether it renders what I get up to without hassles. There's ageing speculation that we might see IE6 for Macs, but why bother?
Maybe I'd turn to Netscape 7 more often if I wanted an all-in-one job with mail and even AOL Instant Messenger. There are many who keep it as a convenient default browser (yes, Mr T, I know default is an odd word for something you use most of the time, but as you're learning, computer terminology is nothing if not obscure sometimes). But now speed does come into it for me, while I remain unimpressed by Netscape's print options.
The extra fun with Safari and Camino is customising them, thanks to people like Reinhold Penner. So this is how I "dock" my browsers, in rough order of preference.
There's my long answer, Julie. Oh, and as for my default, there isn't one, not with IC-Switch tucked up in the menu bar. A flip-click and you're done!
11:08:05 AM link 
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