Safari 3.0 wins
I’m an unabashed Safari hater. Correction, I *was* an unabashed Safari hater. I think the transition first happened when I picked up an iPhone and realized that Safari makes mobile browsing seem like second-nature. (I know, I’m such an Apple fanboy. I’ll go wallow in shame now.) Still, I was unconvinced that there need be yet-another-browser-to-support.
It’s no secret that I love working on web apps. A necessary part of writing good web apps necessitates delving into the front-end technologies that the end-user interacts with while using said web apps. Thus, I’ve always been a fan of Firefox (for it’s developer friendly tools and plug-ins, it’s strict upholding of standards) and IE (out of necessity, due to widespread adoption, and the fact that they really did a good job on IE7). I’ve come to live with the fact that these two browsers simply must be supported, but Opera and Safari were always troublesome.
Then comes along Safari 3.0. I would have never known had I not installed Leopard over Thanksgiving weekend. Not only is it blazing fast, standards compliant, elegant, and full of new-hotness - dynamic widget creator anyone? - it comes with it’s own Inspector tool. Included are handy tools like a DOM-inspector, a CSS box model metrics tool, and a network transfer analyzer. The latter even comes with helpful hints about how to speed up transfer times, reminiscent of YSlow. The only thing missing is a firebug-esque debugger where one could set breakpoints. Oh well, nothing is perfect.
In fact, I’m sure Safari 3.0 is still missing a few bells and whistles. Even as I write this entry, I notice the lack of support of rich WYSIWIG editting in Safari that I usually have with IE or Firefox. Like I said, nothing is perfect. At least I won’t loathe debugging Safari specific issues as much as I have in the past. Maybe it’s also time for me to give Opera another chance…