Browsers for your mac
We've been advising customers for some time now to run Firefox as their main browser. IE5 for Mac has been dead for some time, and it is an increasing liability. It crashes on numerous sites, including ironically msn.com... Safari is fast, stable and secure, but it has a history of compatibility problems. Over the past few years whenever a customer calls us about a site that won't work right with Safari, we suggest downloading Firefox. This remedy is almost 100% successful.
To Apples credit though, such calls are increasingly rare as Apple continues to improve Safari with each OS upgrade and update. The problem though is that the improvements to Safari are bundled with and apparently integral to the OS. This means if you're still on 10.2 or 10.3, there is simply no way to run the latest and greatest Safari. Not a big deal? Perhaps it is. Perhaps it isn't. Meanwhile, the latest version of Firefox has been continually available for the Mac on every version of the Mac OS back to 10.2 (and every version of the Windows back to Windows 98!). If you just want a great browser, it's a lot easier to download and install Firefox than it is to upgrade the whole OS!
With Safari 3.0 which is currently available in beta form on Mac OS X 10.4, Windows XP and Windows Vista, and will soon be available on iPhone, then Leopard (10.5). It appears that Apple is going to get serious about the browser market. If Apple takes a hint from Firefox, and continues supporting and providing updates to Safari that do not abandon prior versions of the OS then we might be really getting somewhere. I'm hoping for the best. Come-on Apple - You can do it!
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