I'm a die-hard Safari user when it comes to my web browser of choice. I use that because of its speed, its standards compliance, and its fantastic rendering engine. Pages just look better in Safari.
I've shied away from Firefox, for instance, because it has very poor text handling. By that I don't mean it renders text positionally incorrect; rather, its kerning and leading are almost invariably inaccurate, and it often fails to anti-alias text (I suspect it can't anti-alias text in fractional point sizes, which comes up increasingly as sites adopt “em” sizes). Firefox renders text the way other operating systems do—which along with its flat X-Windows GUI feel just screams “port” to me—and avoiding such inconsistent, inelegant lettering is supposed to be one of the benefits of Mac OS X.
What I'm getting at is Firefox is very fast and nicely standards compliant, but I spend too much time on the net to put up with ugly pages when Safari offers me the same speed and layout quality plus superior text rendering. (On the other hand, I'm seriously evaluating Opera 5 at the moment because of how polished its rendering is even though its use of Webcore instead of Web Kit means it lags behind Safari in other ways.)
But I've just now found a great use for Firefox.
After using Firefox to check for errors (on its part or mine) in the display of my new blog design, I had an idea. A really good idea, if I do say so myself. I'm so happy with it, in fact, I've added Firefox permanently to my dock right beside Safari. Firefox has suddenly become a great web browsing option, because of one little change:
I disabled everything.
I opened up the preferences, and I turned off Java. And I turned off Javascript. And I even turned off images.
Then I ducked into the “Fonts & Colors” settings, and I set the “serif” font choice to Monaco 12pt. And I set the “sans-serif” font choice to Monaco 12pt, too. And I set the “monospace” font choice to that as well. And I set the minimum font size to 12pt. Basically, I picked a font and put my foot down.
And then I checked both the buttons for “Always use my fonts and colors” and I set the text to black and the background to white.
Bingo, I had myself a wicked-fast, standards compliant, CSS-understanding browser that disregards everything except the raw text and layout instructions for sites. It ignores Flash ads, splash pages, and the flocks of tiny birds that follow my cursor around the screen. It turns up its nose at thoughtful choices like dark yellow text on a slightly darker yellow background. It bites its thumb at attempts to make text so small I'm fooled into thinking it's Braille.
Say hello to “Firefaux.” Hell, say hello to 1992 while you're at it.
What I did with Firefox is the exact opposite of how I use Internet Explorer. I've long kept a copy of IE around with everything enabled (including Java, which I keep disabled in Safari) to use exclusively to test site designs. It's handy to have such buggy, unpredictable, and inaccurate browser around for testing the “worst case scenario” for web sites. Explorer is the “special” (as in “helmet wearing”) member of my web design toolkit.
But Firefox is now my lean, mean, Wayback machine. I can't believe how fast it loads pages now, and unlike Linx or other text browsers this is a tabbed browser that understands stylesheets, tables, forms, and frames.
It's not perfect (e.g. no spellcheck) but it's damn good. Definitely my choice for what I'd use if I was stuck with dial-up access at a hotel, for instance, and if you're in a hurry it'd be hard to beat for rapidly checking sites before rushing out the door.
Basically, it's become the world's greatest Gopher application. ;-)
