An ongoing investigation: Browsing the www

I’ve had a very ter­ri­ble cou­ple of years com­ing up on the Inter­net. When it began, it was easy. I had my gate­way lap­top, I used IE until 2004 when I heard about Fire­fox. It was a sim­ple choice. Fire­fox had tabs, it was faster, it had the lus­ter of being open source. (In fact, it inspired my fanati­cism for all things open source). But in 2005 I got a tiny power­book and Safari was so cute and new. I was dis­ap­pointed with Fire­fox on my power­book. The wid­gets were ugly and pix­e­lated, noth­ing like aqua at all. At this point I was ded­i­cated to Safari, only using Fire­fox for sites that rejected Safari for what­ever reason.

But I wasn’t sat­is­fied. I started flirt­ing with other web browsers: Shi­ira, Opera, Omni­Web, Camino, Opti­mized Fire­fox builds… It was a con­fus­ing time. I exper­i­mented heav­ily. Even­tu­ally I began to fall in love with Camino. It had the ten­der­ness of real mac app, but also the cer­tain flare of being open source and dan­ger­ous like Firefox.

When I upgraded to Leop­ard, it was back to square one. I went with Safari for a while because Camino was strug­gling with 10.5. Then Fire­fox 3 came around with its hype and fancy Smart Loca­tion Bar. I fell back into my old ways. I was using a PC at work, Fire­fox felt right, cut­ting edge, cus­tomiz­able, fun.

Since then I’ve not set­tled. I can’t decide. I’m switch­ing weekly. Nobody has exactly every­thing I want. Here is where I stand now:

Safari 3

• I love to use cmd-1, cmd-2, etc for links on the book­marks bar
• You can­not set Google Reader as your default feed reader
• In gen­eral, works fine, but
• is bor­ing

Safari 4 beta

• “Smart Address Field”, sim­i­lar to Firefox’s Smart Loca­tion Bar
• Top tabs, makes sense.
• Devel­oper Tools are very cool
• Top Sites? Yuck!
• Chokes here and there
  • Espe­cially in Word­press
  • And with the Tum­blr book­marklet: when I use a key­board short­cut to open, in my case cmd-1 because it is first on my book­marks bar, it opens into a new tab instead of a new win­dow. Very frustrating.

Camino

• Uses cmd-1, etc for book­marks bar
• Uses Key­chain to save passwords
• Feels very at home in OS X
• But but­tons suck in Leopard
• Some sites still reject Camino

Camino 2 beta

• But­tons fixed for Leopard
• Del key no longer works for going back a page
• Finally has drag­gable tabs
• No smart loca­tion bar, which I’ve become very com­fort­able using

Fire­fox 3

• No key­board shorcuts for the book­marks bar
• Doesn’t use Key­chain to save pass­words, which is very annoying
• One mil­lion awe­some extensions

So I have no idea what to do. I was using Fire­fox for the last month, but last week I went back to Safari. It is hard to choose. What are you feel­ings? Do you have such trou­ble deciding?