Safari 5
June 10th, 2010 | Published in Uncategorized
The first browser I used was NCSA Mosaic, but I soon moved to Netscape Navigator. I switched to Firefox nearly as soon as it became available, and it’s been my primary browser ever since. (I’ve always had as many browsers as would work installed on my Mac to test things.) Lately, however, I’ve noticed that Firefox starts to get really slow after a week or so of use, and I’ve found myself stopping and restarting it periodically to get better performance.
I tried switching to Safari when Safari 4 first came out, but a couple of things moved me back: the “awesome bar”, which searched titles and the interior of URLs, and the NoSquint plugin, which remembers how much I’ve increased the font size on sites. (I also consider Flashblock an essential, but WebKit has the equivalent ClickToFlash.) When I saw that Safari 5 had similar functionality to the awesome bar, I decided to try switching again. That was Tuesday, and so far it’s going well. Or rather, it was until I started writing this post: ironically, the first time I tried to add the link to NoSquint, Safari crashed.
I haven’t found an equivalent for NoSquint, but the Reader feature has been working pretty well for me. Some people (like Ars Technica) have complained that this feature breaks the business model for most commercial sites, but all I have to say is, if you don’t want people to use the feature, make your site readable to start with.