Benz Blog

Time to get my ideas out of Stickies and into the blog – I’m going to try and create 1 entry/day until I’m caught up.

Although there are many things about Firefox that I really like, I’ve switched to Safari. The biggest reason is HTML form support, which really stinks in Firefox. In Safari, HTML form fields appear to be “1st class” Aqua elements, while in Firefox they look like Windows components:

Safari:
Edit: sorry – image no longer available
Firefox:
Edit: sorry – image no longer available

Appearance alone would not be enough to make me switch. As someone who builds HTML forms as part of my living, I find myself filling out forms probably much more frequently than your average home or business user. Because of this, I’ve become quite speedy at it, at least until I tried Firefox on the Mac. The problem is that Firefox doesn’t allow you to tab into anything other than text fields. It skips right over dropdown lists and checkboxes, making me reach for the mouse, which in this case tends to slow me down. Safari allows this (although I think you have to enable full keyboard access in the System Preferences). Furthermore, the home/end key remapping technique doesn’t work in Firefox, but works great in Safari.

Another big problem for me is that I can’t use Firefox to access the WebLogic admin console because it refuses to display the Java applet in the left pane. This doesn’t make sense to me – it’s just Java after-all.

But wait – there’s more – in the upcoming release of Tiger, Apple is claiming that Safari is now faster than Firefox, although I honestly don’t have any speed issues with Safari under Panther.