There are a lot of standalone applications available for both Mac and PC which convert documents to PDF but it’s nice to have this function freely available within Safari.

Firefox does not include this functionality but I do believe it is a future feature request.

If a recent poll on boards.ie is anything to go by then all the cool kids are using Firefox on their Macs. 63.79% of the 58 members polled voted with a preference towards Mozilla’s darling browser while Safari claimed a 34.48% share, Camino accounted for 20.69% of the votes. The only other browser worth a mention is Opera which claimed just over 10% of the vote. The remaining browsers on the list, which included IE, Shiira, Flock, OmniWeb and iCab, might as well have not bothered been included on the poll. Between them they only accounted for 7% of the vote. (click to see the poll image)

It’s worth baring in mind that the poll allowed for multiple selections. Some may think that because of that it doesn’t reflect as accurately as it should but I think it was the correct decision because most of us tend to flirt between different browsers on a daily basis.

Here are some of the reasons given by those who voted;

‘I used Safari when I first got my Mac but I’ve moved back to Firefox now. I missed my extensions far too much’ – ‘The Firefox spell-checker drove me crazy. It was always switching to the British dictionary and then refusing to download the Irish one’ – ‘Firefox has grown too fat and bloated. Safari 3 all the way!’ – ‘Certainly rate it (Camino) above FF which tends to hang on me from time to time’

‘With the high performance of Safari 3, I haven’t used anything else since it was launched! – ‘But I reckon, well, I hope, that by Xmas 2007, that Safari will be amazing’ – ‘I really love Safari 3 and i still reckon that in a few months time it will be fecking amazing, even though it is awesome right now’

‘For a start it’s written in Cocoa and is a true mac app as opposed to a port of a Windows app like Firefox’ -’I find it pretty damn stable, certainly more so than Safari which usually crashes several times a day’- ‘I love its integration with the OS, even the latest release 1.5 making use of the built-in Mac OS X spell-checker’ – ‘I am liking Camino more and more. Very fast.’

‘Opera mini FTW!!! Gives me my mobile internets!’ – ‘ Gotta agree with you about Opera mini, great little program. Too bad I never have any credit to use it. – ‘Opera browser all the way! Speedial is great, nice, skin-able and fast. Widgets are handy as you can have video downloader etc. Fullscreen mode and loads of hot keys!’

So there you have it. Even-though Firefox won the poll it came in for quite the slating while Safari Beta 3 and Camino received the most praise.

Opera’s biggest victory seemed to be related to it’s mini version for mobile devices. I haven’t used Opera mini or a mobile device for browsing the web for the matter but I have used Safari Beta 3 and I have to say…’It’s fast, it’s damn fast’.

But that’s not enough for my liking. It’s not aesthetically pleasing to look at. The brushed metal look is horrible. I hope that by the by the time Leopard comes out, Safari gets a face lift. It needs it badly in my opinion.

I echo some of the abuse which Firefox received from the above quotes. It’s a nice all round browser but it doesn’t sit right on the Mac for me. It is very process intensive, suffers from the same well renowned memory leaks on Mac as it did on Windows/Linux , isn’t as stable as it should be and doesn’t block pop-ups as well on Mac as it does on Windows.

My personal browser preference is Camino. It’s a very quick browser, has a nice and tidy interface and rarely crashes or hangs. It’s not too far from being the complete article but I would like to see an improved attempt to facilitate some Firefox extensionability on Camino. They are both Mozilla projects after all!

But what tale do the stats from this blog tell?

I have a stats package by the name of Firestats installed on macBlogger. You may have seen it in use in the comment forms; it displays the poster’s browser and operating system. It’s a nice plugin and the administration page for the plugin displays the accumulated browser/operating system statistics across the entire site, this includes hits and comments. The image below indicates that Firefox is edging Safari once more in relation to popularity.

These stats however don’t differentiate between Mac, Windows and Linux operating systems. Approximately 60% of macBloggers’ visits occur on the OS X platform! While Firefox is the most popular browser, it isn’t the most popular Mac browser on macBlogger. That accolade goes to Safari.

According to Google Analytics, Safari accounts for 54.49% of the hits received on this blog while Firefox has 39.94%. The much loved Camino (for all it’s raving) only has 3% of the share.

To tell you the truth I’m surprised that Safari is such a popular browser. Before I looked at the stats, I expected Firefox to come out on top easily enough.