Jared W. Smith

It’s been around a month since I pulled the trigger and made the Google Chrome beta channel (which I’ve since upgraded to the dev channel for extension support) the default browser on my Mac. It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough to where I can’t go back to Firefox now as my daily driver.

The three big reasons why Chrome reigns supreme? Speed, more speed, and WebKit. And now that extensions have come over to the Mac, there’s not too terribly many reasons to stick with Firefox anymore.

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It’s the end of an era: On February 1, 2008, AOL’s Netscape division will pull the plug on Netscape Navigator browsers after several attempts to revive itself with branded versions of the Mozilla Seamonkey suite and later Firefox. AOL is recommending that current Netscape users jump over to the standard Firefox product — which, to be fair, is what people were switching to, anyway. read more »

I’m writing this post in Safari 3.0 Beta for Windows XP. Yes, I kid you not — Apple has released Safari, its flagship Mac OS X browser, for Windows. It certainly doesn’t look much like a Windows app, as Apple seems to have created its own portable UI framework that it’s applying to its software for Windows now. It looks just like a Mac app, right down to using Lucida Grande for the titlebar. It even antialiases fonts like a Mac does.

In the ten minutes I’ve spent with it, it seems to be pretty fast and easy to use. The antialiasing will take some getting used to — I’m wondering if this is adjustable. Some of the fonts look pretty horrid, to be honest.

This is still amazing, though, and definitely nothing I saw coming. Good job, Apple — someone had to bring KHTML to Windows!

So I’m thinking I’m going to switch back to Internet Explorer. For all the problems it may have, ActiveX is still so amazingly convenient for plugins (plus additional free software, like BonziBUDDY, that really helps me through my day), I love scrolling marquees and background sounds (and have missed them terribly in Firefox), and, well, it’s the browser every Web person designs for ANYWAY.

Thoughts?

Saw it on Slashdot:

News.com is reporting that HP / Compaq will begin to install all PCs sold in the US and Canada with Netscape. Users will be prompted with the option to set either Netscape or IE as the default browser.” From the article: “The agreement, which the companies are set to announce Monday, is the first browser distribution deal with a major PC maker since the end of the browser wars in the 1990s, according to Netscape, a division of Time Warner’s America Online subsidiary.

I think Firefox would have been a far superior choice here; I don’t know, it’s something about Firefox having a far superior interface to Netscape’s pandemonium (and that’s being nice). It doesn’t help that Netscape 8 doesn’t have near the number of extensions and themes available for it as Firefox has. And did I mention that horrifying interface?

I give HP credit for providing its customers with an easily-accessed alternative. It’s a commendable action that more PC manufacturers need to look into doing. However, the alternative here is so confusing and unruly, people will just use IE anyway.