Now that Opera distributes their advert-free web browsers for free, it is a bit more difficult selecting the best browser for your day-to- day surfing. On the Mac, I have Safari (comes with Mac OS X), Firefox, Opera and Camino. Whilst there are other browsers available for the Mac, I prefer to use the ones that are available for free and in most cases, run in most major platforms.
I select browsers based on its speed of rendering web pages and support for standards. One important requirement is its ability to render pages from my online banks, Citibank and BPI. I wish that PNB also has this facility but I just hope that if and when they do release one, it is standards-compliant. Anyway, all four browsers, Safari, Opera, Firefox and Camino, render my online banks properly. You may have a difficult time using any of the browsers above on the default BPI page, though, but BPI has a version for non-Internet Explorer users (I wish that all organizations do the same thing!).
Next is support for my blog host, blogger.com (blogspot.com). Firefox and Camino provide better support for my blogs than Opera and Safari. On Safari and Opera, you will not be able to see the other text formatting icons, etc., when you are writing your blog entry using the web-based form. Unfortunately, the same can be said of other sites. This is due to the Javascript support of both Safari and Opera. I find it weird specially for Safari since it is based on an open web-rendering engine used by KDE (KHTML). Maybe the next version of Safari will have better support.
Speed is often the domain of Opera. I admit that it renders pages a little bit faster than Firefox and Camino. Safari is the slowest of the four. However, due to its 'weight' (since Opera comes with an e- mail client, among other things), I have decided not to make Opera my main browser.
Camino is the Mac-only equivalent of Firefox (although there is a Firefox for the Mac). The difference is mostly the UI (and some functionality) - both use the same Gecko rendering engine, though. For some twist of code, Camino is a bit faster than Firefox. However, Firefox has more extensions and, at least on my system, is more stable. I am not sure if it is exclusive on my system configuration but using the 360-scroll button on my Apple Mighty Mouse seems to be slower on Camino than Firefox.
What do I use often? Safari still. Why? Although it is not as fast as the other three, its private browsing feature is something that I use often. No, not that I have porn sites to hide, but I just do not like pages cached on my computer. Firefox 1.0.7 comes next even with its non-native Mac look-and-feel, somehow I feel that it is far more stable than Camino. To each his own, I believe. My friend, Joel (http://www.suplido.com/joel), highly recommends Camino, Opera and Firefox (not necessarily in that order). So, try them out - you can get Firefox from http://www.spreadfirefox.com, Camino from http:// www.caminobrowser.org and Opera from http://www.opera.com.
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I appreciate the comments and suggestions that readers send me via e- mail. Thanks most specially to Sammy Mallare of DLSU. Your suggestion on Linux-migration is briefly addressed in this article. Watch out for more. If you have other suggestions, please do send me e-mail at mac.n.tux <at> gmail.com. Visit my personal blog at http://rom.upcompsci.net, too.
