The Great OS X Browser Dilemma

So you want to browse the web on a Mac?

OmniWeb is a non-starter. We don’t pay for browsers, and I don’t have the screen real estate for its thumbnail-tabs. Despite using WebKit under the hood (like Safari), it manages to not be compatible with all the sites Safari is. Freaky.

Opera may be free as of late, but no thanks. It just has this cheap Windows vibe.

Safari is ever so native, but it’s seriously lacking in power-user features. I basically can’t use Safari without PithHelmet and Saft. Unfortuately, Safari’s lack of a clear extension API means those two step on each other’s toes all too frequently. Safari routinely crashes when I’m checking Gmail or SuicideGirls, and that’s like my whole web right there. Damn.

Firefox is the seemingly obvious choice: mostly reliable, increasingly ubiquitous, featureful, and hugely extensible. But it feels wrong on a Mac: the widgets are flat, the interface conventions are just slightly off, and it doesen’t take advantage of Cocoa offerings like system-wide spellcheck and Keychain password storage. The 1.5 beta is nice, and faster than its predecessor, but not perfect.

Camino is purdy and Mac-like, with the same rendering engine as Firefox under the hood. Seem ideal? The problem is, Camino doesn’t have Firefox’s extensibility. All those cool Firefox plugins like AdBlock and GreaseMonkey? Nope, can’t have ‘em. You get the Mozilla engine, you get a Cocoa interface, and that’s it. Plus, it’s not exactly the same as Firefox under the hood; even the nightly builds still have the flicker-on-AJAX-update bug that the last Firefox release is cursed with.

So you want to browse the web on a Mac? My advice is to learn to love Safari’s paired-down feature set or learn to ignore Firefox’s non-nativeness.

Or, in short, you’re hosed.