Being the Apple fan that I publicly am, I’ve also been very partial to Safari. That changed the other day when I launched Firefox while just being curious about how it stacks up to my “usual” browser.
I really like Safari. That being said, in the past few days, I am not longer using it as my default browser. The element I really liked about Safari was the RSS feature. After numerous, spinning beach balls(Apple users will know what I’m talking about), I grew tired of how it behaved.
It’s annoying and time wasting to have that happen. RSS was made to make getting info more simple and quick. On top of that, Safari does not fully support WordPress. So for creating my posts, I ran Camino along side Safari in order to use the “quicktags” feature in WP. You can’t use that in Safari, so posting with that browser reverts back to manually typing up HTML code as well as your text. Can you see the headache going on here?
I also experimented, briefly, with making Flock my standard browser, if not something to use in conjuntion with Safari and replacing Camino. I can’t say that I was overly happy with its performance, RSS interface, and overall feel. I still think that it’s a great browser, but the development needs to keep going on it until I would be comfortable using it full time. Maybe it’s something to keep revisiting as the built-in blogging and photo sharing support is pretty cool.
That being said, I think I am 80% with being fully converted into using Firefox. The ability of using plugins has already found me pretty happy. Using Tab Mix Plus and Wizz RSS News Reader has me feeling even more efficient than I did with Safari. Additionally, I’ve changed the theme to make it look more like Safari. That might sound sad to some folks, but having it look like how I’m used to made the change all the more easier.
Pages load quicker than before, and I mean that by being more snappy. Clicking on a RSS article has the page load in a few seconds. And if I want to blog about something I read, I open a new tab and make a post. Even publishing a podcast gets easier because if I need to search for info to add a link into the show notes, eveything is all in one.
These are just some preliminary thoughts about the switch. I have to say that I’m pleased with how easy it was, but my experience with doing these things might be more than the average user. For now, I’m sticking with Firefox.