I was an avid user of Firefox on Windows, but since making the move to MacOSX I have been trying hard to like Safari. As the default browser on MacOSX, Safari is OK – it works on every site I needed it to, and was fairly fast, but it also has a few annoyances. For one, the RSS reader is fairly terrible, tending to bog down the whole computer when reading more than a handful of posts. Safari also tends to hang with the beach ball cursor more than I think is strictly necessary on a very expensive laptop with a dual core processor.
I put off trying out Firefox on the Mac because I knew version 2 was coming down the pipe. That day has arrive, and I don’t think I will be going back. FF2 may not be quite as integrated into the OS as Safari but it is faster (especially with the aforementioned RSS feeds) and looks great.
The release notes have a list of improvements. The big one for most people will be the integrated spell checker, but MacOS applications always have that enabled anyway (I like the way the FF spellchecker works better though). The advantages of some of the other enhancements such as the client-side storage will take a while to filter down to users since most websites will not take advantage of them (people tend to use Flash for that type of thing these days anyway). I am looking forward to trying out the improvements to SVG Text, but I am probably one of a very small group of people who care at this point.
The latest version of Firefox (for Windows, MacOSX, and Linux) can be downloaded from the Mozilla web site. Highly recommended.
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