Firefox vs Safari

I am a very big fan of Mozilla’s open source browser Firefox. As I mentioned in previous posts and as I maintain on the about page Firefox has been my constant companion and main browser like forever. It has served me well with it’s great addons, speed and great inline search. With it’s latest iteration (3.0) Mozilla introduced some great features – the Awesome Bar, smart bookmarks and the amazing speed enhancements that solved most of the issues I had with version 2. As I am rather new to the Mac (4 Month) I didn’t think I would ever touch Safari – I obviously didn’t use it on Windows although I had it installed. It does not have the extensibility of Firefox and you need to hold down the command key to open a link in a new tab and not in a new browser window (!!). So when I heard Leo Laporte talk about using it himself on the Mac as his main browser I wondered what in the world would make anyone use it? In fact Leo uses the open source browser Webkit that is the core of Apples Safari and it’s single most important feature was supposedly performance. This brought me to consider Safari/Webkit again as I do occasionally experience performance problems with Firefox 3 – it still does sometime eat a lot of memory, slows down or die on me. So recently I started regularly downloading the Webkit nightly builds and using them on my MacBook Pro in tandem with Firefox and I installed the Windows version of Safari on my Thinkpad at work.

On the Mac

With the MacBook Pro the difference in performance is noticeable but not to a degree that would make me completely abandon Firefox. The thing is – Firefox usability features save a lot of time and the addons add functionality that is not available in Webkit/Safari. So although Webkit is generally faster when rendering Javascript heavy applications like Gmail, Firefox compensates by it’s features. I will use both for the foreseeable future on my Mac and I can recommend Safari as a decent main browser to anyone in need of a simple browser.

On the PC

At work I found one massive advantage to Safari as a second browser. Similarly to the Mac experience it is indeed faster then Firefox and I make heavy use of that on the Thinkpad. The thing is that I use a lot of corporate javascript based apps at work and their performance in Safari is astounding. No waiting, just click, click, click and go. I hate waiting for forms to validate or content loading CMS systems and with Safari my pain has been eased. I still use Firefox as the main browser but Safari on Windows has become a part of my daily work computing.

Thoughts

1. Yes I know – we got Google Chrome now – also based on Webkit, lightning fast and also PC only and unstable. Until it’s reliability is on the level of Webkits nightly builds – no thanks.
2. Firefox also has an early 3.1 b1(and 2 actually) build that Mozilla calls Minefield. It has a greatly improved really fast javascript engine so it’s performance exceeds that of Webkit according to benchmarks. Unfortunately it isn’t reliable yet for everyday use and therefore it’s a no-no for me in the same way as Chrome

If you are on a Mac and for some reason want to skip Firefox – Safari is a great browser. Do not fear using it – I don’t.

Oh dear Yahoo…

I really don’t know how to put this… Yahoo is dying and dying fast.

During this week a number of top executives have announced that they are leaving the company. Among them are some execs from Yahoo’s more successful acquisitions like the founder of del.icio.us or both co-founders of Flickr. With the drain I think the top management structure is really starting to crumble and the people who are left will face the wrath of Yahoo’s shareholders. Expect a major down-swing of the Yahoo’s stock price and more people jumping ship in the days to come.

I still consider Yahoo to be one of the greatest internet companies but for some reason the whole Mircosoft vs Google vs Yahoo war is moving forward and Yahoo seems to be the first casualty…

Techcrunch.com has an interesting list of ex-Yahoo executives and where they landed post Yahoo.

Short Slovak Barcamp review

The first slovak Barcamp took place as I already mentioned in an earlier post on the 14th of June in Bratislava’s A4 venue. It was a great event and I wanted to thank the organizers and sponsors for the great work during the whole event.

The conference itself was a mix of technical presentations from some leading experts in their specific topics (Synopsi – security, Digmia – hosting, ….), some startup promotion and experience sharing ( Richard Voda – Pozrisi.sk, Chris Clay – soup.io,….), to some specialized presentations like Michal Pastier’s Viral and others. From this point of view the conference was very rich on topics and cool presenters. On the other hand the variety of presentations made it somewhat difficult to refocus on new topics with each next presentation and it was difficult to keep track of everything. That however did not diminish my overall experience and I enjoyed my time there a lot.

The organizers have promised to do another one this year looking forward to the Slovak Barcamp’s next installment.

Internet Video future…

Blogmaverick has a great article about Hulu.com and Youtube.com. Even in Slovakia (small country by any and all measures) I see people attempting to use video on their websites in hopes of monetizing it in the future. Some even say video is the future of the internet.

Well this excellent write-up puts the whole thing in to perspective. Youtube works the Web2.0 way – first gather the audience and then think about monetizing it. But compared to other services online video requires massive storage that amounts to costs for storage/cooling and therefore earning money from this is quite difficult. ‘Till now Youtube didn’t find a way how to really monetize it’s massive audience. On the other hand Hulu.com seems to have gotten it right from the beginning – getting important partnerships and licesnsing agreements for it’s videos even if possibly paying a lot beforehand. This means even if their audience is nothing compared to youtube’s they still will be able to get more revenue.

Read the article for the whole story.

Firefox 3 is available

Saying the release of Firefox 3.0 to the masses went as planned would be misstating the facts. It is true that Mozilla planned and worked towards a record breaking release but I think way things went was not what they anticipated. A few minutes before the actual release time the servers got flooded by requests so that the Spread Firefox and Get Firefox pages went down. The downtime caused that nobody could in fact download the final release of Firefox 3.0 until an hour later. Mozilla kept the users informed via their blog and on Twitter.

Finally everyone was able to get the download and the race for the Guiness record is on. Mozilla hopes to get as many downloads as possible to generate headlines and more interest from the non-tech savvy people. I for one must say that at the moment there is no real competition for Firefox 3.0. There are many sites where you can get reviews for the new release of Firefox so it makes no sense for me to review it at the moment but to be clear about my take on this – Firefox 3.0 is the browser to beat. Heck even Walt likes it.