Valhalla Island

There is no ideal browser for OS X. Firefox for Windows is where it’s at. If you’ve read this blog for a while you’ll know I’ve been through a few changes since switching. From Safari to Camino, from Camino to Firefox. Lately Firefox has been crashing over 5 times a day and it’s annoying, I want to switch.

One good thing about browsers for the Macintosh is choice. Here’s what I have to choose from:

• Camino
• DeskBrowse
• Firefox
• Flock
• IE 5
• Netscape
• OmniWeb
• Opera
• Safari
• Shiira

I thought I should try OmniWeb next, it’s a non-free browser in a free broswer world, it must be good. It’s very different to other browsers and you can tell it’s developed by a team of paid developers, there are a lot of features and a lot of options.

Too many things put me off OmniWeb right from the start. It feels kind of rushed together with not much attention paid to detail. The shelf of tab thumbnails is OK, but it feels poorly implemented. The bookmarks bar really bothers me, it kind of blends down into the page making it look like a menu bar on the top of each page.

I started writing this post in OmniWeb before remembering why I walked away from WebKit in the first place, the TinyMCE editor WordPress uses doesn’t work in WebKit and I really like the editor. Even if OmniWeb was wonderful apart from the editor problem I still wouldn’t stay, the last thing I want to do is use more than one web browser.

So I’m back in Firefox with another new browser to choose. Joey suggested that I try DeskBrowse. I like the idea of the controls on the bottom but having it stick to the side of your screen and not be able to pull it off? That’s stupid.

There’s two left that I take seriously and I haven’t throughly tried yet. That’s Flock and Opera. I really like both the interfaces, Opera’s especially. I don’t like the idea of not using Gecko though. I’ll be able to use the web dev toolbar with Flock but I’ll definitely miss Firefox’s content search, I’m not sure if that’s in Flock.

It’s Flock for this next week and if it’s not perfect, I’ll try Opera full time the following week. If Opera’s not perfect… I’ll stop using the internet.