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Which browser is the best one to use now-a-days?

5K views 61 replies 29 participants last post by  krs 
#1 ·
I have been using Camino for many years but it's giving me more and more problems even after installing a brand new, pristine, download.

Latest issue is that there are some elements, links and buttons, on web pages that are simply missing.
They show up with Safari, Firefox and Chrome, but not with Camino.
I find that to be a major issue since it's not obvious if something is missing unless it's a button the one knows has to be there - like a final submit button for an order.

The official reply from the Camino team is that these are web site issues, that may be but that doesn't help me any. The sites where I noticed that so far are large commercial sites like ebay and Dell. not some private web page.

Anyway - I need to switch to a different browser and wondered which browser most people are happy with.

Safari which would be my first choice seems to crash a lot when I talk to people using it
Chrome has trouble with Flash
Firefox ad a lot of problems but seems to be better with Rls. 15

Any others?
I remember somebody was using SeaMonkey....
 
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#10 ·
#3 ·
It's been my experience that Safari in its virgin state is pretty much rock solid but can start to get flaky depending on which extensions and or add-ons have been applied.
 
#15 ·
I use the one that comes with the system. Never added an extensions or add-ons and therefore never had any problems.
This. Me too, no extensions.
I can't live without Ultimate Status Bar, ClickToFlash and AdBlock. Whenever I try to use a computer without those, it just grates. I also like ExifExt but it isn't the deal breaker that the first three are.

Craig
 
#7 ·
I mostly use Safari (80% of my time), and Chrome for most of the other 20%. I also have Firefox installed for sites that don't work well with webkit based browsers, though I almost never need it anymore...

I find both Chrome and Safari to be very solid and fast. Even with extensions. Though I generally try to limit the extensions installed to ones I actually use.

In general I'd suggest sticking to one of the more popular ones (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or maybe Opera) as the chances of developers testing against them are significantly better.
 
#11 ·
I have been using Camino for many years but it's giving me more and more problems even after installing a brand new, pristine, download.
...
Safari which would be my first choice seems to crash a lot when I talk to people using it....
Forget those you talk to who says it crashes a lot and just try it yourself with YOUR Mac and see for yourself.

It sure works fine for me 98% of the time and with just a few used enabled extensions and no crashes that I can recall. OS X SL 10.6.8, Lion 10.7.x (very seldom) or ML 10.8.2 occasionally.
 
#12 ·
I just remembered another reason why I no longer use Safari - I get tons of advertising on ehMac - top, bottom and even between posts.

With all that garbage between the posts I don't even want to look at this forum again; what's especially annoying are the religious ads.

A bit of advertising is fine - hopefully only relevant things, but this is ridiculous.
I never realized ehMac was that cluttered up with ads.
 
#23 ·
I have been using Safari for a few days now but for some reason it still stumbles on some web sites.
Trouble is I can't really determine if it's the web site that just happens to be slow at that time (or some intermediate point in the connection) or actually the browser.

I'll just keep on trying it since it seems to be the over all favourite of people who commented thus far.
 
#25 · (Edited)
Since best browser nowadays is more subjective than anything else...

Personally I go with a safari/firefly mix depending whether I need a supported browser. I tried chrome, but some of the google operating procedures creep me out, and I am sure most companies do the same thing.

Edit: I mean Firefox.
 
#26 ·
Since best browser nowadays is more subjective than anything else...

Personally I go with a safari/firefly mix depending whether I need a supported browser. I tried chrome, but some of the google operating procedures creep me out, and I am sure most companies do the same thing.
Do you have a link for this firefly browser?
 
#29 ·
I've used Safari (though I kept others around, particularly Firefox) primarily. It's good to have a secondary browser to help troubleshoot a problematic web site.

Since Safari 5, however, I've grown tired of updating Firefox seemingly every WEEK (they have really blown their creditability out of the water IMO), and Safari works beautifully everywhere I tend to go, so it's even more the default choice than ever before. I really enjoy the implementation of sharing, reader and Top Sites, so for me its the best. I've no interest in Chrome but I keep SRWare Iron handy as the troubleshooting secondary browser.
 
#30 ·
+1.

Even though I'm using SL and normally Safari, I had a few hiccups but after using the three top options in the reset safari it has been steadfast and reliable, and even more so with the 5.1.7 update and one last reset safari a few months ago.

But it does seem to have some sort of memory leak, that seems to depend on one's browsing and open windows habits, but easily overcome.

And yup. I just tried and opened FF that I keep in reserve, and as chas_m states, it wants to install an update yet again. And guess what, the install says it failed.

I'll use Safari thanks and have few problems with it nor any sites lately.
 
#31 ·
My creaky old system 10.4.11 supports only Safari 4. Camino runs circles around this version of Safari. Biggest issue I have with Camino is recognizing pdfs and going straight to download as Camino opening a pdf within the browser is absolutely painful. One site sfgate.com forces me to kill the adblocker in order to see a particular tab. Safari usually fails to direct this sites links correctly so I still end up running Camino. Ironically almost all the ads use Flash which I also disable, so all I see are a bunch of question marks instead of the ads.
 
#34 ·
I have been using Chrome since it was released for the Mac, but I'm thinking of switching back to Safari and/or reactivating 1Password after Chrome decided to clear my cache and nuke all of my passwords. I'm realizing the hard way how many web services I have to log into.
 
#40 ·
I mostly use Safari with DNT+ installed, mostly because syncing bookmarks between my Macs and iDevices is simple. However, for development it's hard to beat Firefox with Firebug. Apple really mucked up the developer tools for Safari this time around I find.
 
#41 ·
I just updated Camino to the new version (2.1.2 at this time), because the much older version I was on was no longer working with newer scripts, and I'm quite happy with it's speed and rendering of pages. Currently on a powerbook g4 and using Tiger 10.4.11, it far surpasses any experience I've had with Safari or Firefox, which I used for many years, but got heavier after 1.5 and freaked out one day, losing all my bookmarks and passwords, so I reverted back to what was a whole new Camino back then (that was 3 years ago). I use Safari if I find something doesn't seem to be working on a website, and many times, I find it's just the site, not my browser, sometimes not. I'm sure if you're on a newer machine, Camino would just fly!

I've never used Chrome, and have no desire to, but my needs are simple (light, tabs, adblock and security) , Tenforfox was not comfortable and was slower than Camino. iCab, Seamonkey, and a whole slew of others have been tried, but I always come back to Camino.
 
#42 ·
Camino 2.1.2 definitely has a problem.
A couple of weeks ago I took a trip and for that I always take a small portable Mac which I don't normally use - I like a huge screen.
I hadn't used that Mac for quite a while and it was still running Camino 2.0.3
I decided to check the web sites I had problems with using Camino 2.1.2 and to my surprise, those web sites worked properly with that older version of Camino.
S whatever the programming was on those web sites, Camino 2.0,3 rendered it properly like the other browsers I had tried and Camino 2.1.2 did not.

What makes all this a bit tricky is that there doesn't seem to be anything obviously wrong with the rendering using Camino 2.1.2 - there are just some fileds missing occasionally but if you don't know that they should be there you would never know that anything was wrong.

I haven't had time to dig into this further - to see if maybe a setting on Camino causes the problem.
I rather doubt it since I set up my browsers in the same manner - in any case, on my main Mac I just upgraded from Camino 2.0.3 to 2.1.2 so I assume all the selectable options stayed the same.
 
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