

Why I Use Safari Instead Of Firefox - comatose_kid
http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/04/why-i-use-safari-instead-of-firefox/

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ajross
Huh... "this guy", "the author" (2x).

Do people really not know who jwz is or why it might be notable that he
doesn't use Firefox? Generally when a personal rant like this is upvoted, the
reason isn't the content alone.

~~~
milesc
The irony of his essay really hit home after watching the first few minutes
the Alex Faaborg video he linked to. Alex uses an interview with jwz to
introduce the philosophical foundation that Mozilla is built one. Times sure
have changed.

I thought Jamie's essay was pretty reasonable. It highlights the open vs.
closed debate that's been going on for decades. I doubt that open systems will
ever be able to provide the end-to-end consistency and integration that an
Apple-style walled garden can provide (if done right). You have to decide
what's more important to you.

~~~
ajross
> You have to decide what's more important to you.

Unless the walls get too high. And of course there's the argument that the
walled gardens are built on land fertilized by open systems; they can't
survive alone.

~~~
milesc
Agreed. I greatly admire Apple in many ways, but I prefer to be part of a more
open community - even if that means some rough edges.

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drcube
I tried using Safari when it was first ported to Windows, back when I used
Windows, which means at least 5 years ago. It was slow and I couldn't do the
things I was used to doing in Firefox or Opera, so I switched back after about
a week.

I can't live without tree style tabs, noscript, ghostery, firemacs, facebook
purity and _especially_ adblock plus, which is why I have stuck with Firefox
for a good part of a decade. Does Safari even _have_ plugins?

What, besides allowing you to turn off tabs and being the unchangeable default
on Mac, does Safari have going for it? In my extremely limited experience, it
seems to fall short of even IE, let alone Firefox, Opera or Chrome.

~~~
twiceaday
It does have ad block, it does have plugins, and it is a changeable default.

~~~
drcube
Thanks.

I misread. According to jwz, it is the unchangeable default on _iOS_ , not
OSX.

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rmk2
>> "I'm certainly willing to inconvenience myself for my political beliefs.
I've done it before and I'll do it again.

But in this case, the inconvenience is too great. Apple's approach is
resulting in a product that is just so much more usable than Mozilla's (and
especially Google's) product that using it all day, every day would be just
too much of a pain in the ass."

This seems to be a wee contradiction, you don't mind inconvenience when it's
for political conviction, however, the inconvenience stops at tabs in your
browser and your browser's UI. _Luckily_ there are the many, many, many
political beliefs that do not touch on the unsurmountable problem posed by
UX/UI for which one could live with a bit of inconvience.

I don't mind some inconvenience to take to the street and partake in a
demonstration, but my sofa's user experience is just _so much better_. I'm
certainly willing to inconvenience myself for my political beliefs, though.

~~~
ajross
He's explaining it correctly: some amount of inconvenience is worth some
amount of adherence to principle. Different people put that bar in different
places -- jwz is willing to compromise in places where rms isn't. And neither
is about to light themselves on fire or blow up a building for free software.

Now, you can argue with his metrics if you like (I happen to like Chrome a
lot, though not so much Firefox or Safari these days). But that's just an
opinion, it doesn't make what he says a contradiction.

~~~
rmk2
I just seemed off to me considering how he (probably rightly so) preempts most
critique throughout in a somewhat hyperbolic yet lacks the the same tone in
his closing statements.

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mistercow
>Google takes this even further: all of their UI decisions are made
statistically.

I like how the author scoffs at this as if it is self-evidently preposterous,
yet Google is one company whose UI design elegance is consistently competitive
with Apple's.

I can't think of a single UI design choice in Safari that I prefer over how
Chrome does it.

~~~
bdunbar
_I like how the author scoffs at this as if it is self-evidently
preposterous,_

Have you used gmail lately? The new UI is a mess.

~~~
mistercow
I'd argue that it's less of a mess than Mail.app in Lion.

~~~
fromhet
Well, it's just like jwz's rant on FF vs Safari. Mail.app is not as good, no
doubt about it. It lacks almost everything a mail client should be able to do.
But it works, does it's job quickly and easily and then is out of my way. I
wish Thunderbird was the same way, but it just isnt.

------
RandallBrown
It's bizarre that this guy doesn't use tabs. Oh well, to each his own.

I use Safari instead of Firefox because the swipe gesture to go forward and
back works so much better. I love that I can swipe away half the page, get a
peek at what I'm going back (or forward) to and then return to the page I was
on without triggering a reload or anything happending. It breaks some sites a
little bit (GitHub especially) but it looks cool on most of the Internet so
I'm fine with it.

~~~
shabble
There is a school of thought that prefers applications to delegate their
window handling duties to the window manager, in order to have consistent
behaviour across applications.

In that case, both MDI and tabbed UIs remove the capability of the WM to
manage that specific rectangle of content, and require you to use in-app
controls, which may not even exist.

This is especially pronounced for those who use non-standard window managers,
say Ion or Awesome window manager which let you tile new windows rather than
having them appear whereever they choose.

Dunno if that's jwz's reason, but it's one good reason that I've had in the
past (although not for browsers, the number of tabs I keep grows too rapidly
to manage nicely alongside long-lived windows)

~~~
fusiongyro
I'd be shocked, since he's using a Mac for its UI and extolling its virtues.
I'm not aware of a way to swap out the Mac WM for another one.

~~~
shabble
That's a good point actually. I'm in the opposite camp just now - I'm on a
mac, but I'd quite like a way to alter the WM behaviour for some apps.

The Apple 'our way is best' approach is often great, but when it fails, you're
stuck without easy (or even hard) ways of fixing it.

------
klausa
I don't know whether it's my Mountain Lion install, particular version of
Chrome/Opera/Firefox - but there is one reason why I use Safari - its butter-
smooth scrolling.

Seriously, I was pretty huge Opera fanboy - but then I switched over to Safari
to check out some page that was just broken in Opera and I was blown away. If
you don't have Mac with multi-touch trackpad, it might not be that big of a
deal, but boy, does it make difference.

I hate almost everything else in Safari (no ability to pin tabs, that
ridiculous "yeah, we won't resize tabs so we can show you more, just hide them
in this stupid little >> menu" thing, I could go on and on...), but the way it
scrolls outweighs anything else for me.

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ZeroGravitas
While I can sympathise since I also dislike tabs and prefer integrated
browsers such as Safari and Epiphany (though I'm currently using Pentadactyl
which sort of has tabs) I'll note this contradiction:

 _"Anyone who truly understands UI design realizes that every preference
option is an admission of defeat: it's there because you couldn't just get it
right the first time."_

Yet Safari offers tabs and gives you an option to turn them back off. Seems to
directly contradict his issue with Firefox not giving him that option.

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hollerith
>every few months I'm forced to upgrade [Firefox] and shit has moved around
and I need to re-learn how to do a task that I was happily doing before

There is a fix for that, which I have been happily using for the last month:
Switch to the "Extended Support Release" version of Firefox.

Since Mozilla makes it slightly difficult to get this version, I will provide
instructions: go to ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/ and download
and install the latest version with "esr" in the name. If you make a mistake
in identifying the latest version, it will upgrade itself to the latest
version when you run it.

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halayli
I feel jwz is trying to find a rational to his feelings.

------
octotoad
Why I Dismiss Webpages Instantly: Green text on black background.

My eyes hurt after only a few seconds.

It's not 1996.

~~~
dustinewan
Well, he did complain about tabs in the browser. Seems like he is stuck in
1996.

~~~
read_wharf
A very lucrative 1996.

------
voidr
Sorry, but I refuse to read any content that makes my eyes bleed.

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antirez
The real question is why he does not use Chrome ;)

~~~
stock_toaster
I can only speak to why Chrome irritates me (but apparently not enough to
switch to something else yet).

1) When I copy the url, it adds the prefix into the paste buffer. This is the
opposite of what I expect from an application -- "Do what I ask you". Even if
you select _just the hostname_ of a non-ssl site, it _still_ prefixes the
`<http://`>. This is a constant irritant when I try ssh'ing to a host or
pasting a hostname to someone/something that only wants the hostname.

2) It displays some prefixes (https) but not others (http). I would prefer to
be shown all prefixes. There was even talk of hiding https prefix for a while
as I recall.

3) Location bar history completion always seems to show me the worse possible
result. It often omits things that I want, and I find no way to complete to
them. Sometimes it shows the result only if it type the full url.

4) Choices that make sense if you are trying to make the browser an OS, by
ignoring OS functionality -- native printing dialogs/previews, native dns
caches, tabs (custom window management), task managers, etc. Not all of them
are choices I like (printing, custom dns cache). Some I like (tabs).

5) I am not sure how I feel about bundling flash. I have 'click to play'
enabled, and the only thing I use flash for is the occasional youtube video
someone sends me to view.

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CervezaPorFavor
When one starts using the "it just works" phrase or its variants, I know no
further reasoning would be necessary.

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kijin
> _Anyone who truly understands UI design realizes that every preference
> option is an admission of defeat: it's there because you couldn't just get
> it right the first time._

No, it's there because "getting it right" is subjective. If you're happy with
Apple's defaults, the only thing it means is that your ideal of UI happens to
coincide with Apple's idea of UI, no less, no more.

If you would like everyone to respect your subjective preference of one
browser over another (and there's nothing wrong with that), let's keep it all
consistently subjective and avoid using moralizing phrases, okay?

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yalestar
If we all told the author that he was an utterly fascinating contrarian, would
that help him not feel so angry?

