Safari has unfair advantage over Firefox

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Vukicevic says he doesn't believe it's intentional, but I would disagree. This is what Apple, or any corporation would do on purpose.


It maybe slower than Safari, but Firefox is a better browser. Firefox allows me to save embedded quicktime vids when Quicktime developers have prevented the save option. Now I don't have to mess around with tcpdump or wireshark to find the location of the video. I just right click in Firefox
 
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I don't think it is intentional either. Apple still needs switchers. Switchers compare software suites across platforms. It would not be in Apple's best interests to make Firefox slow on the Mac. It would not be in Apple's best interest to make ANY software slower on the Mac!
 
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I don't think Apple benefits from limiting third parties to creating sub-standard applications. Third party software is the engine that drives the adoption of a platform; no good software, people won't use it.

Microsoft had a vested interest in hiding their APIs back when they did: they already had the biggest selling OS and they were also the single largest third party provider for that OS.

Logic would indicate that Apple should be very interested in a rich set of vibrant applications for the platform. I may be giving Apple a free pass here but my gut feeling is that this is more likely a series of APIs that they do not feel comfortable supporting outside of internal use.

APIs are contracts - the only thing worse than not giving people access to all of an API is giving them access to an API that will not be supported in the next release. Apple has the ability to update their own software when they update the OS; getting every third party to update their software is difficult at best.
 
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Apple do make quite a bit of money from people using the google box in Safari, that is the only reason I can see.
 
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With the great addons available for FF, I will not be switching :)
 
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Since this story broke, I unstuffed Safari 3 and fired it up for the first time. It's faster than Firefox on my G4, but even with Pith Helmet it's far, far less user-friendly.

Firefox's extensions/add-ons run the clunky Pith Helmet into the ground, and the request to register it brought a chuckle.
 
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I don't think it is intentional either. Apple still needs switchers. Switchers compare software suites across platforms. It would not be in Apple's best interests to make Firefox slow on the Mac. It would not be in Apple's best interest to make ANY software slower on the Mac!

I completely agree. There are Relativly fewer applications for mac that run well. Why would Apple want to Discourage 3rd party aps like this?:|
 
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When I first got my Mac, I virtually ignored Safari - downloading FF immediately and sticking with it. I used the skins to make it look more "OS X" etc, but always noticed that it seemed sluggish compared to FireFox on my old PC laptop, that was 3 years older.

I tried Camino, which is nice but it seemed to be a compromise between FF and Safari, getting neither benefit to be honest.

I am using Safari now, and am using it for about 80% or so of my browsing, despite being pretty critical of it early on. Safari Block has improved since 2006, and Safari 3 with Leopard certainly seems a lot more stable than Safari 2 with Tiger ever was. Plus Firefox seems slower than ever. FF 3 is promising, but you only have to go to a flash rich site, or even the Apple site and scroll up and down quickly to see that Gecko simply cannot render at the same speed as WK - especially on a 2nd monitor.
 
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If it is intentional, I really wouldn't blame them for wanting the edge over the competition?... hmmm
 
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I agree with dalison. Apple makes some money from the google bar in Safari, yes. But not that much. It's much more likely that the way they're speeding up Safari is not quite the "right" way to do it, programming-wise. They've got it to work for Safari and probably don't care if someone else gets it to work for Firefox or Camino or what have you- but they can't official support it for whatever reasons.

Remember, one big reason Apple didn't release the iPhone SDK immediately was that they probably didn't have their dev tools in a position to say "Yes, you can count on it working like this for a fairly long time". This may be the same deal.
 

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