Ever since I got my Mac a little over two years ago, I’ve used the Firefox browser as my default.  I used it on Windows before, and liked the fact I could pretty much carry on as I had been.

Firefox 2 on OS X, however, was a pig.  It ate memory like a zombie, crashed often and occasionally took over the machine – something not incredibly common on a Mac.  Firefox 3 came around and changed all of that.  No, I lie.  Most of that.  The memory thing is a distant memory.  The crash thing still happens, but rarely.  But, oh the machine-sapping, go-nuts, CPU-bashing take-overs are all too common.

I had tried to switch to Safari before and had problems.  I don’t quite remember all of them, but one was the inability of Google Notebook to work with it.  Not Safari’s problem, I know, but a problem for me nevertheless.  Well that problem has gone because Google Notebook is gone.  At least for me.  It’s end of life.

So when I saw some of the neat features of Safari 4, I thought it was probably time I gave it another go.  To be fair, Safari 3 had improved since my early attempts.  Some of the controls for using tabs had improved and that’s a big thing for me because I use lots of tabs.

So far, I’ve made it through a couple of days with Safari only, and here are my pet peeves.  Some are merely what I am used to, some I maintain are poor behaviour in Safari.

1. When opening a new tab, the tab focus changes, but the content of the tab you were on remains displayed until Safari has something to replace it with.  This is visually wrong.  I should see a blank canvas as soon as the tab focus changes.
2. The downloads window does not allow me to pause downloads and restart them.  Sometimes I download many files at once, and may wish to pause some to let others finish earlier.
3. The downloads window does not allow for easy clearing of downloaded files.  You can click on an entry and press delete to get rid of it, but the highlight disappears with the entry and leaves no easy keyboard navigation to quickly weed items out.
4. When I have more tabs than can be displayed across the width of the window, Safari just hides them in a menu at the far end of the tab bar.  Firefox allowed me to scroll across as well, a feature made practical because of the Apple Mighty Mouse with it’s scroll ball!
5. Although Safari has a plugin architecture, supposedly, there are nothing like the number of add-on features I could use in Firefox.  At it’s most basic, this makes tools I do have harder to use.  The Evernote clipper, for instance, is a handy icon in Firefox, or can be selected from a context menu.  On Safari, it’s only available as a bookmarklet, which means I have to keep it well placed in my bookmark bar.
6. Despite the fact that Safari is measurably faster than many other browsers, I note that if I open a lot of tabs at once (Shift/Cmd-clicking links) Safari seems to ignore later tabs for a long time, preferring to load pages in a more left-to-right fashion.  Firefox would inevitably finish in this order, but elements of far-right tabs would begin to appear much sooner, allowing inspection to see if you had the right page(s).
7. Although there is a setting to open other applications’ page requests in a new tab instead of a new window, Safari can’t seem to open it’s own links in a new tab.  By this I mean when I click a link on a web site that says “open in a new window” (an HTML target of “_blank”), it does indeed open in a new window.

As far as the plus side goes, it does seem to render faster if you’re only using one tab at a time, and the new “features” of Top Sites and Coverflow history are brilliant.  The latter two are what sparked me into action to try this out.

In Firefox, I used to leave a certain number of tabs open most of the time. My GMail, Google Reader, my Flickr page, podcast page, blog page and a few more.  I used Firefox’s automatic restoration of the last session to keep these active.  Now, I have set up Top Sites to have all of these pages pinned in an order that suits me and whenever I need one, I simply Cmd-click the Top Sites icon and visually find the page I want and click that.  It’s two clicks on the mouse, and two ticks to accomplish.

The visual history is great.  When researching material for my podcast, I’ll often open lots of pages and close them again but may later find I want to go back somewhere when I realise it had something that pertains to a new page I have found.  I actually had this very issue last night and I can tell you that page thumbnails are way more memorable than URLs!!

So on balance, I’m doing pretty good with Safari 4.  I think this may finally be it.  The time I stick with it and don’t look back.  I’m also proud to support a browser that is truly embracing the future with spectacular standards support for both current and upcoming standards (an area it has always excelled in).