Darren O'Neill

I have been using both Safari 4 on Mac and Internet Explorer 8 on PC recently to see if they could persuade me to ditch Firefox as my default browser. Firstly I installed Safari 4 and decided to try and use it for a whole week for both work and home use. The main thing I thought I would miss were the add-ons but I fared surprisingly well. I use the web developer toolbar and Firebug in Firefox pretty much everyday and didn’t think I would manage well without them.

In the end this didn’t turn out to be a problem because the “Develop” menu provided takes care of most of my needs. I found you can switch this develop menu on by opening up a terminal window and typing:

defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1.

As well as providing a web inspector which allows you to inspect individual elements on the page, you can also disable images, styles and JavaScript in much the same way you can in the web developer toolbar in Firefox.

In general I have liked using Safari: pages render fast and I like the new “Top sites” page that greets you when you open a new tab:

Google did this with Chrome but it has been implemented better by Apple. All in all I have enjoyed using Safari and it is definitely a contender to replace Firefox as my main browser.

I don’t use a PC that much anymore but wanted to give Internet Explorer 8 a go; one because I will have to make sure sites I develop in future work in it and two because I was intrigued. I hate Internet Explorer 6 with a passion and don’t think much of the seventh version either but I tried to forget about that and go in with an open mind. After playing around with it for about half a day I am happy to report I think it is a huge step in the right direction and I have enjoyed using it. The Accelerators which are like add-ons take a piece of content on a page and allow you to mail it using Gmail, or add it to Delicious, or map it using Google Maps etc. They work very well and are a great addition.

I tested some of the sites I have developed in the past and they all seem to work fine which is a relief as I tried the Beta 1 version ages ago and some of them rendered terribly. Microsoft have also added a compatibility option so you can choose to render the sites using the IE7 engine, the IE8 engine or the IE8 compatibility engine. If and when I start using a PC again (hurry up Windows 7) I would have no problem using Internet Explorer (something I haven’t said in years). Let’s hope the security is as good as they say it is and over the next few weeks there aren’t lots of news stories detailing various holes hackers have found.

Tags: Apple, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Microsoft, Safari 4