Safari vs Firefox

Both Apple and Mozilla have recently released souped up versions of their browsers, Safari and Firefox. I’ve been using them both (on a Mac) and definitely have an opinion.

First, Safari just seems zippier, though not by a lot. I also like how Safari is more integrated into the Mac environment. That’s very handy for scripting with Applescript and interacting with other Mac software.

However, Firefox will remain my browser of choice. I have two reasons:

1. The "awesome bar" just does a spectacular job of getting me to where I want to go. The new Safari is much improved, but it’s not nearly as smart as Firefox.
2. Firefox has superior keyboard shortcuts, and I’m a real heavy user of those things. Specifically, Firefox’s ability to search link names in a eb page is a real time saver.

That’s my conclusion. If you’re a heavy user of the awesome bar and keyboard shortcuts, it’s no contest: Firefox is better. But there’s nothing shabby about Safari, so if your usage patterns are different from mine, it’s definitely worth a look.

Blog By email

Maybe I’m the last to find out, but I just discovered that you can enter blog posts on WordPress using email. How handy! They’ve made allowances for special encodings for categories, tags, excerpts, etc.

This could be really great for composing longer blog entires.

This is my first post by e-mail.

Safari 4

I’ve been a pretty avid Firefox fan, but I try to keep an open mind. A while ago, I gave Opera a whirl, but I found it wanting. With a new Firefox release coming very soon, and a new Safari release just completed, I thought it was time to take a look at Safari again. I’m glad I did. It feels faster and I certainly prefer the aesthetics on my iMac, but I haven’t tried the PC version or the old iBook. So stay tuned.

Online Documents

I have been a major proponent of online documents as evidenced in one of my more popular pages on Zoho vs Google. I stand by what I’ve written there, but I have greatly reduced my reliance on online documents. My four reasons for using online documents (rather than desktop documents) are collaboration, publishing, small computer impact, and backup. Yet for much of what I do, the only reasons that matter are collaboration with myself (synchronizing multiple computers) and backup. When those are the only reasons to be online, there is a better solution: Dropbox. Dropbox automatically synchronizes multiple computers and provides backup and restore capabilities. Size might be an issue, but for Dropbox offers a supersized service for a fee.

If you’re running in a multiple computer environment, check out Dropbox.

Welcome

I’ve noticed that some of my more popular blog entries in my other blog (Thinking Things Through) are my rare posts relating to using the Internet. Consequently, I’ve decided to write more about that kind of thing and put it in a separate blog. Here you will find no economics, political science, financial analysis, or anything like that. Now if I can only get started.