The two week Safari challenge

I have used the Safari browser the last few weeks and I did noticed the difference in speed but I missed a lot of the add-ons on features that other browsers offer.

You can easily add sidebar functionality to Safari with SafariStand. Not only does it add the ability to see your history of sites and downloads, you can search it, and it also lets you toggle a sidebar showing a thumbnail of your open pages, and let you rearrange them. And it lets you tell Safari to open new links in a new tab. You can get it here: http://hetima.com/safari/stand-e.html

Well, I feel a bit out of place then… I prefer IE7. And Safari over Firefox when on a mac… so… i dunno.

You should try a “two week Opera challenge”. try 9.5 beta 2.

I’ve tried Opera before, but you’re right, maybe I should try a two week challenge

I couldn’t use Safari for 2 continuous days, when I tried once, few months ago.
It was just out of place except that its faster than its counterparts.
But now I have to see if it works on a 2 weeks basis.

Safari Stand will add your sidebar functions, more or less. I can’t stand FireFox - it’s too slow and clunky. I try other browsers now and then and always come back to Safari - the speed is addictive. FireFox also “hangs” a lot, and I don’t like that. The extensions are nice, but they tend to make it even slower than it is to begin with.

Most of what you’d want Safari to do is available in an extension. I recommend Inquisitor to jazz up the search function. And Safari has one option most browsers don’t that is essential for me - an “arrange in front” option (hold down the option key and look under the WINDOW menu.) I usually have a lot of windows open and once in a while, I need them all sorted so I can see where I am. I also love the way Apple’s dictionary function works within Safari - it saves me a lot of time. No extension necessary. As with most things Mac, it just works.

I get pretty steamed when sites like Stumbled Upon (and Google and Yahoo…) have special tools that only work with IE or FireFox - why should I be expected to use an inferior browser? If they want to deal with MAC users, they need to accomodate Safari. It’s simply the best browser out there. If you try it exclusively for two weeks, my bet is that you won’t be able to go back to Firefox because it will seem to crawl too slowly.

You can easily solve problem #1 by looking at the preference settings in Safari.

In fact, you should just browse through all the preference settings and see what other possible changes you might like to make.

I had used firefox for a few days and the main problem is it gets slooooooower as you surf but not with Safari. Anway the extensions are great but I don’t miss them.

Tweak the preference as John Jones had mentioned and you can have 1 window and multiple tabs.

Anyway to each his own but make mine the webkit.

@Paulo Pereira: Maybe you have a better version of Safari than Steve Jobs put in my computer. My Safari comes without gestures or sidebars.

@Morgaine: The second part of my challenge is to try out Safari Stand. I installed it a few days ago and will report back soon.

@John Jones & AdamC: There is a preference setting to “Open links from applications in a new tab in the current window” and there are instructions about using ⌘-click and shift-⌘-click to open links in new tabs, but there’s no option to open EVERYTHING open in a new tab, regardless of what the site designer wants. I have noticed there is that functionality, though in Safari Stand.

Mozilla’s Camino - As fast as, if not a little faster than, Safari. Dude, try it!

http://caminobrowser.org/

You can close Safari tabs with this SIMBL plugin by Joey Gibson. When I found this I was super excited.

First entry on his blog - http://www.joeygibson.com/blog/index.html

You neglected to mention which version of Firefox you have been using - I presume it’s version 2.

I don’t know about Firefox on a Mac, but on a PC, version 2 did consume enormous amounts of memory. I’ve been using Firefox 3 (started with beta 3 and updated as new releases happen)…and I’ve found it to be significantly faster and low on memory usage.

Also, I think it’s unfair in the way you criticised Firefox. You did point out that Safari is missing some great features whereas Firefox provides them (tabbing, on screen search and sidebar)!

You can have ‘fast searches’ with Safari by adding Acid Search. The Google field then becomes a wide range of sites accessed from a dropdown menu, including any you care to add to the list.

If Cmd/click is too much effort to open a link in a new tab, try scroll wheel/middle click on any multi-button mouse.

[...] two weeks ago I undertook to stick to Safari all the time, 24 hours a day/7 days a week, while at home. Thank goodness I had an oasis of sanity [...]