What is the best Browser/Mail program for OSX

What is the best one?

I am currently using firefox, and also use safari that came with the mac - which is a better one of the 2

Or is there another one out there that's even better?

What about the mail program? Which is the best or most popular one amongst mac users?

its personal preference really, I use firefox, there are several threads if you look that are about browsers.

In popularity terms:

Mail would be the most popular since it comes with OS X and it has very good interoperability with Address Book and iCal.

Entourage would be second probably, with Thunderbird, Mailsmith, and PowerMail scrambling for third.

But like Macman said - it's all personal preference.

meltbanana314 said:

In popularity terms:

Mail would be the most popular since it comes with OS X and it has very good interoperability with Address Book and iCal.

Entourage would be second probably, with Thunderbird, Mailsmith, and PowerMail scrambling for third.

But like Macman said - it's all personal preference.

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I use Thunderbird on my PC and think it's great. Ditched the "outdated" outlook express and internet explorer for thunderbird and firefox.

I know that entourage comes with office and have it. Which would be better out of entourage and thunderbird?

I have and am running Office 2003 on my PC and I hate Outlook 2003 - takes too long to load up and was not user friendly - I know it's meant to be a full suite with scheduler etc but it's a lot of unecessary stuff I don't need, and I have a feeling entourage is something similar.

Thunderbird is a great mail and news app. Is thunderbird better/functional than Mail - or are they pretty much the same?

StarDrifter said:

I know that entourage comes with office and have it. Which would be better out of entourage and thunderbird?

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Try both and see what works for you. Entourage/Outlook and Thunderbird are two completely different beasts. Thunderbird is a simple, open source mail and newsreader application based off of Netscape, and Entourage/Outlook is a fully featured (bloated and insecure) personal information manager from an illegal monopoly. You choose. =)

StarDrifter said:

Thunderbird is a great mail and news app. Is thunderbird better/functional than Mail - or are they pretty much the same?

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Both are easy to use, but Mail is OS X native (therefore it looks and behaves like a natural Mac application) unlike Thunderbird which is a port from Win32/Linux. Plus, Mail has built in integration with Address Book and iCal - Thunderbird doesn't.

meltbanana314 said:

Try both and see what works for you. Entourage/Outlook and Thunderbird are two completely different beasts. Thunderbird is a simple, open source mail and newsreader application based off of Netscape, and Entourage/Outlook is a fully featured (bloated and insecure) personal information manager from an illegal monopoly. You choose. =)



Both are easy to use, but Mail is OS X native (therefore it looks and behaves like a natural Mac application) unlike Thunderbird which is a port from Win32/Linux. Plus, Mail has built in integration with Address Book and iCal - Thunderbird doesn't.

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Okay, I think I'll give Mail a go and won't bother installing Thunderbird. If entourage is anything like Outlook I won't bother to use it, but have it anyway as part of office. I have tried out Outlook 2002 and then Outlook 2003 on the PC and both have not been good experiences. It may be fully featured but most of that stuff is unecessary. Besides we have the trusty little iCal app. I like your definition "a fully featured (bloated and insecure) personal information manager from an illegal monopoly"


About the browsers, I like the look and feel of Safari since it is a natural Mac app. However it is very simple compared to firefox - no where near the functionality and customizeability of firefox.

For instance, it doesn't have a button to open a new tab, and you can't customize the toolbar. And firefox has got heaps of extensions to use that are really useful (ie mouse gestures)

However firefox is not designed as a natural mac app in mind. When you click bookmarks for example, you just get a plain black and white menu without any icons for the bookmarks like you do in windows firefox (or like safari which has an icon next to each bookmark). Another good comparison is if you go to www.google.com on both browsers, you can see that in safari, the radio buttons look nice and the "google search" button looks 3D-ish with rounded edges whereas in firefox, they are just rectangular and look flat.

Is there any way to improve the way firefox renders web page views to look better (ie like safari) and to make it have the mac "look and feel"

Or is there a new version of safari or another native mac app that is on par with firefox in functionality?

StarDrifter said:

Or is there a new version of safari or another native mac app that is on par with firefox in functionality?

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You need Camino (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/camino/)

It uses the same engine as Firefox (called the Gecko engine) and it looks and feels like an OS X native app. It's my favourite browser for OS X and it's the only one which gets a place on my dock.

You can grab a speciall optimized version for your PowerBook here:

http://camino.ilnm.com/

Click the last build date (March 11th as of this point) and choose the one marked "Camino-G4-7450.zip" for downloading. Unzip it and drag the Camino icon to your applications directory and give it a spin!

meltbanana314 said:

You need Camino (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/camino/)

It uses the same engine as Firefox (called the Gecko engine) and it looks and feels like an OS X native app. It's my favourite browser for OS X and it's the only one which gets a place on my dock.

You can grab a speciall optimized version for your PowerBook here:

http://camino.ilnm.com/

Click the last build date (March 11th as of this point) and choose the one marked "Camino-G4-7450.zip" for downloading. Unzip it and drag the Camino icon to your applications directory and give it a spin!

Click to expand...

Is the optimized version any different from the normal version? It's not a cut-down version - of "lite" version is it?

The optimized version is no different from the normal version other than it has speed boosts applied to each processor. The G3, G4 7400, G4 7450, and G5 processors have tiny little differences in the way that they are built. Optimizing them just means that they are streamlined for that particular processor, sort of like different fuels are recommended for different cars. You wouldn't put diesel in a Ferrari, would you?

Thanks for the tip on Camino. I preferred 0.8.2s tabs, but it definitely seems snappier.

Just tried it out and didn't think much of it. It's really not much different than using Safari. Even the preferences look exactly the same.

What I need is a native mac version of firefox. Camino doesn't allow customizing the toolbar, and the greatest appeal of firefox is the extensions available.

I have put a button on the toolbar to open up new tabs whenever I want for instance much simpler than pressing Apple -> T or something and I like using the mouse gestures for back and forward. I just press the button and move the trackpad left or right. I know that by enabling horizontal scrolling I can go back and forward on Safari, however whenever I scroll down and move my fingers off to an angle it's always going back and forward in the browser - very annoying so I've disabled it.

Camino does not have as many plugins but it is a native version of FF for OS X. This is a matter of taste, I don't use many plug-ins to begin with so their absence does not bother me.

To customize the toolbar for Camino choose View => Customize Toolbar and add or remove as needed.

Kokopelli said:

Camino does not have as many plugins but it is a native version of FF for OS X. This is a matter of taste, I don't use many plug-ins to begin with so their absence does not bother me.

To customize the toolbar for Camino choose View => Customize Toolbar and add or remove as needed.

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Okay that's alright then.

What about mouse gestures - can you get extensions like on firefox?

And what about themes?

StarDrifter said:

What I need is a native mac version of firefox. Camino doesn't allow customizing the toolbar, and the greatest appeal of firefox is the extensions available.

Click to expand...

Right click in the space between the search box and the address bar in Camino. You will see a customize toolbar menu option. Click it and customize to your heart's delight.

EDIT: kokopelli beat me to it.

As for the extensions, you've got a valid point. Many of them are useful - however, I frequently run into problems with extensions making Firefox more unstable than it already is. Camino does what it does just fine for me.

Try Shiira? (http://hmdt-web.net/shiira/index-e.html)

StarDrifter said:

Okay that's alright then.

What about mouse gestures - can you get extensions like on firefox?

And what about themes?

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No FF extensions as of the current release, probably never. Camino is native and uses Cocoa for UI rendering, FF uses XUL. Camino is meant to act as much as possible like FF and still be native. It uses Cocoa so there is a limit to this however. http://www.nada.de/mac/camino/cep.html will give you a few more options though for config. Might not work with the nightly build.

Themes run counter to the idea of it being a native OS X app. You could use ShapShifter with themes I suppose (attached my current desktop as an example). There are also Camino themes but not as many as there a FF themes. resexcellence and http://www.efritz.net/caminothemes.html are the two I know of.

What it boils down to is do you want native or do you want extensions? Extensions rely on XUL which is not native.

EDIT: For mouse gestures in specific I did a quick google which sent me here http://www.efritz.net/caminotricks.html which led me to here http://www.bitart.com/CocoaGestures.html That should allow you to do mouse gestures in Camino (and other cocoa apps). Before laying down money for it though I would wait for Tiger and see what you think of the new Safari. Of course you could always use the free version which should do fine.

meltbanana314 said:

In popularity terms:

Mail would be the most popular since it comes with OS X and it has very good interoperability with Address Book and iCal.

Entourage would be second probably, with Thunderbird, Mailsmith, and PowerMail scrambling for third.

But like Macman said - it's all personal preference.

Click to expand...

Eudora!

The interface is getting old, but it's very functional, and the feature set and level of control is unmatched.

I prefer Safari, I used Firefox for a while but I found it was taking up truly mammoth amounts of virtual memory.