Recently I have been noticing Safari 3.1.1 has been running like doody for gmail when I am at work and at home as well. I also have been having more occurrences of it crashing lately. While I am trying to stick with the “Mac Mindset ™” and use mac only or cocoa apps, or some other kool-aid-ish type thing, I decided to try out Firefox 3 RC 1.
I used to be a HUGE FF fan when it was in its 1.x days. Anyone who would let me, I switched them to using FF. It was like a whole other world. Browsing was just better. Tabs were the norm. Finding text on a page was awesome and you could highlight, etc. And it rendered faster too. I kicked IE to the curb and only used it when QA’ing any work I had.
Fast forward to FF 2.x. I tried to stick with FF, but safari was rendering much faster in its 3.x incarnation, the memory footprint seemed to be way more manageable, and I couldn’t resist it. It’s search was as good, if not cooler than FF. I dove it and actually found I liked it more than FF 2.x and it became my default browser.
That leads me up to now. The past 2 days I have begun using Firefox 3 RC1 more and more and I am liking it. It reminds me of the zippy 1.5. I am also finding it fits well with OS X all the same and by just changing a few settings, I am able to take advantage of some of the little “it works” type of things you get with Safari in OS X 10.5 Leopard.
So, give it a whirl. It is not full release, but it is good enough for me… for now. Maybe I will write more about it, but if I don’t, it probably means I am still just sticking with Firefox 3 now.
