If you check out Apple’s webpages on Safari (http://www.apple.com/safari/download/), then you’ll see that they state Safari is “the fastest web browser on any platform”. I have to say, I disagree….
My quandary begins with porting away from IE a number of years ago – it had become some terrible bloatware, that was slow, and non-intuitive. Moving to Firefox, I found that all of a sudden there was a browser that was fast to start, fast to render, had good plug-ins, was free, and also had good add-ins!
Firefox has been my browser of choice for some time, and like most people I visit a subset of websites daily, or at least frequently. More recently, I have been porting to Apple though, and so for purposes of application suite integration, and getting used to a singular UI, I have started using Safari. And this is really where my bugbear comes in.
Firstly, from my daily usage, there is no way that Safari is faster than Firefox – it just isn’t. Testing on websites that have mutli-component homepages, all of which must be loaded and composited, Safari always loses out to Firefox. It’s also slower starting up. And the final “nail in the coffin” is there are more commonly sites that don’t render in Safari, either partly or totally.
My experience has been on both PC and Mac platforms where I run the browsers side by side, although I should say the “delta” between Safari and Firefox is smaller on Mac. Now, let’s take this comparison elsewhere, on to the iPhone. Apple only recently started letting browser-type applications in to App Store, but the de facto browser on iPhone is Safari. And I have to say that running over WiFi, it’s pretty good. It’s only real issues from my perspective are stability, and the occasional quirk on links being “clicked” – when scrolling is being attempted! But, it’s reasonably fast….
Granted, Apple haven’t made a deliberately untrue statement in reference to their own browser – in fact I’m sure in their tests, Safari did come out on top – but, in my real-world usage, Safari isn’t the fastest – on either the PC or Mac platforms. So I’m asking, on either PC, Mac, or Mobile platform – which do you find the fastest browsers, for start-up and rendering? And which have the least issues? My vote is currently for Firefox, with Safari coming in a close second.
[Image via: Apple]