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Let’s set the record straight: Safari is NOT the world’s best browser
Submitted by Aaron on Wed, 01/07/2009 - 04:04
The last time I visited the safari download page at apple.com I was shocked to see that they had posted a banner that read: Download Safari The world’s best browser. If you aren’t a web developer you might not understand why I would be shocked, if you are a web developer it shouldn’t be surprising at all.
Safari isn’t the world’s best browser, it isn’t even a good browser! In order to qualify as a good browser that browser should at the very least be standards compliant. Safari isn’t standards compliant and it is a headache for web developers to try to build code that will work with it.
Clearly Internet Explorer is the worst browser in the world. This I think any technically inclined person would agree with me on. Internet Explorer (IE) is filled with idiotic bugs and quirks that drive the entire web development world crazy. But just because IE is worse doesn’t mean Safari is good.
Let me give you an example of what I am talking about here. I have encountered issues when designing web pages where I get Firefox working (no problem as usual) I finally get IE working and then I try it out on Safari and lo and behold the bastard shows something completely different and for no explicable reason. Now we aren’t talking about some kind of experimental or hacked html and CSS, I am talking about WC3 validated html and CSS that works on every other browser but Safari. That's pretty bad when you can get even IE to comply and Safari still goes bonkers. This is before even approaching the javascript problems that Safari presents.
We web developers all hate Internet Explorer, but we are forced to bend over backwards to make our sites work with it because it still (for the time being) holds the dominant market share in browsers. So in a way IE is like the swaggering bully that gets what he wants because he has power. But where do the makers of Safari get off trying to pass their non-standard browser off as if they were the king of the hill? Safari has a minuscule market share. Any rational company in such a position should at the very least follow established web standards, but they don’t.
Firefox is the best browser in the world, hands down, no questions asked. Any web developer worth their salt uses Firefox even if they are avid Apple fans with a Steve Jobs shrine in their living room. So please Apple, a little humility, or better yet, make Safari standards compliant!
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- Let’s set the record straight: Safari is NOT the world’s best browser
What do you think about Chrome?
What is your opinion of the new Chrome browser by Google?
Chrome is fast but has less features
Chrome is fast, and is pretty much standards compliant from what I have seen and heard, but I doubt it will ever be as feature rich and flexible as Firefox.
maxthon
Maxthon 2.5.1 is the best browser out there... you can change the skins at anytime, plus it has cool features, like a facebook sidebar.
Maxthon is only for windows and isn't open source
I took a look at the Maxthon home page, but there is no way I am going to download it. For starters the fact that it is Windows only and not open source isn't going to get them very far towards convincing serious users to switch, and non-serious users will just use Internet Explorer. In general when I look at their site I am skeptical at best. Just my opinion of course.
chrome is fantastic
chrome is the best in my opinion
and when working on drupal sites the best thing you can do is have 2 browsers open, one for admin, one for other users. you can see how it looks on 2 browsers at the same time as well.
unfortunately when working on mac i'm stuck w safari and firefox combo.
i hate the new safari. hated the old one too, but the new one is even more annoying. what browser doesn't have favicons displayed on the tabs??? maybe its just my setup? but its unbelievably inconvenient.
"Safari isn’t standards
"Safari isn’t standards compliant"...
I'm afraid, as a technically inclined person, I completely disagree... =)
How do you justify this claim? How is it less "standards compliant" than Firefox 3? Webkit supports more "standards" than just about any browser on the market.
Firefox 3.x, Safari 3.1+, Opera 9+ and IE8 all have pretty reasonable standards support. Code for any one of these browsers and there is almost no reason why your work shouldn't work in any of the others without further coding.
Internet Explorer 7 and below are problematic, but nothing some Conditional Comments won't fix, and they should always be done LAST, after everything else works, for this reason.
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