While Firefox has had some features most browsers snub, including its library of add-on third party applications, it finally caught up with many of the features in the recently unleashed Safari 4 with the Firefox 3.5 update. In fact, most features have been available in Safari for years. Give Mozilla credit, however, for upping the ante with a couple of items Safari lacks. Here’s the rundown:
Private Browsing
While enabled, no history of your surfing whereabouts is left behind in the browser.
Firefox: New. But Firefox has the ability to forget a single site after it has been visited when the user has not turned on Private Browsing.
Safari: First seen in 2005 with the release of Mac OS 10.4 Tiger.
Tab Drag-Out
Tabs have been around in most browsers for the last couple of years, but now some have implemented the ability to drag a tab out of a window to create a new browser window.
Firefox: New
Safari: Implemented in 2007, though the implementation was much improved this year with Safari 4 when tabs were moved from the very top of the window to below the bookmarks bar.
HTML 5 Web Standard
This new media support is not used by many web developers yet, but once developers start implementing HTML 5, they’ll be creating media- rich sites that won’t require you to download additional plug-ins.
Firefox: New
Safari: Added in March of 2008 with the release of version 3.1.
Improved in Safari 4.
Speed
This can be looked at in many different ways. Some folks are touting Firefox 3.5 outperforms Safari 4 by tenths of a second in javascript performance. Apple’s website says javascript performance in Safari 4 blazes past Firefox, though they only include numbers from Firefox
3.5 beta for Windows.
Firefox: Speed-demon
Safari: Blazing fast
Session Restore
If you lose power or quit the browser, it picks up where you left off, even to the last word you may have been typing on a web page.
Firefox: Added in 2006 with version 2.0, and improved in version 3.5.
Safari: No comparable feature.
Firefox 3.5 also has a nifty clear recent history option, and though all browsers have this, Firefox allows you to pinpoint a time range to clear, down to the very last hour of browsing, and includes checkboxes for history, downloads, cache and login info so you can choose what you want to clear. Safari 4 added an eye-catching Top Sites feature that lets you see a panoramic of your most frequently added websites.
All-in-all, we can be thankful both Mozilla and Apple are pushing the peanut forward in web browsing. Whether you’re on a Mac or PC, you have two great browsers to choose from, and you can even choose both if you desire. In either case, you’ll be browsing in style and you’ll be one step closer to speeding through the web of the future.
Lindsay Giachetti
WBS Connect
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