Which web browser is better, Safari or Firefox?

That depends on what you want to do. For general browsing, Safari beats Firefox in speed. For ease and bredth of control, Firefox has the edge. And for Web development, I love Firebug in Firefox. YMMV.

Firefox on mac is about as bad as Safari on windows.

There’s just some interface tweaks and things that don’t feel right at all when using Firefox on mac for me. Plus, I believe Chrome is jumping ahead of Firefox in extension support, which might have been the only reason to use Firefox on mac before.

I’m partial to Chrome, not Safari or Firefox myself.

I like Firefox on the mac personally. It has a nice interface and is less buggy.

I’m on Firefox now, with my usual 50–100ish tabs. I have snow leopard. I never use safari, google chrome is ok too.

@everephebe 50–100 tabs?

holy f*ck

Oh and firefox is great because of the add-ons. I have a stumble button, so I surf the web.

@XOIIO It’s actually not that uncommon. Wikis are famous for generating stupendous tab counts. The real limitation is your hardware. The machine that I’m at right now can’t support more than 40 or so if I want to watch smooth streaming video.

@Nullo oh, well if it’s a wiki then that’s more plausible, still a lot though.

I personally prefer Firefox hands down and despise Safari, but as @dverhey points out, Safari on Windows sucks compared to the Mac version while the PC version of Firefox beats the Mac version. BTW, the Android version of Firefox 4 is also marginal. I tend to run multiple browsers for compatibility, though most of my browsing is done with Firefox 3.6.13 on Win7 and Dolphin HD on my Droid X.

I was a diehard Firefox user on Windows, and even when I made the switch to OSX Firefox was the first thing I downloaded and installed. The addons and theming options are fantastic. That said, I started using Safari recently and it definitely feels more fluid, in touch with the “Mac experience” so that’s what I’ve stuck to. The extension gallery is ever expanding (I was very happy to see SU there and Adblock!) so that’s nice as well. For what I need, Safari has been fine. I don’t think any one is better. (As for Chrome… I’m trying not to submit fully into the cult of Google despite my Gmail address and Google as my search engine of choice so I’ve actually not tried the browser yet. Heard it’s good though).

You shouldn’t have any problem going back and forth between browsers (or using multiple at the same time) at all. I keep Firefox handy for that reason.

@XOIIO Your comment made me laugh—my reaction also.

@everephebe 50–100 tabs! Props for being to handle that. I get anxious when I have 10 open.

I wasn’t bragging, I was hoping someone would intervene. :D

@Nullo is correct, smooth streaming video is harder to come by with 40+ but there are a few tricks to the trade. I use Hulu frequently. One trick: go offline, refresh any pages you’re not currently looking at/“working on”. Dead-weight be gone. Zatoichi marathon here we go!

Opera

@Odysseus Opera is a lot of fun, but it’s incredibly bulky.
@everephebe Thanks for the tip.

Switching back and forth is not hard at all by the way. If you have bookmarks and saved passwords and the like in one application then you’ll have to export them and import them in the other, but other than that you can just run the two applications at the same time. (Though that might be confusing for your mental model of which websites you have open.)

The answer is neither. Chrome is superior to both. Try it, then let us know how much you’re glad you switched :)

@Neurotic_David While Chrome is also a Webkit-based browser, I find it too limited. It works fine for basic surfing, but it has some serious limits to it’s functionality.

Overall, I prefer Firefox for the add-ons and generally smooth functioning over Safari, although I do admit Safari is faster. Also, for some reason, the Macs on my school computers often have problems while using Firefox; I’ve had problems with not being able to post text in form fields, videos and other .sfw files not working, etc. I have no idea why the computers (or network?) seem to prefer Safari, but considering I don’t use it as much as I use the browser on my personal laptop (also a Mac) I don’t mind Safari.

Hrm. I’ve never even heard of Safari until now. For the most part, I swear by Firefox.

I prefer Safari, as I am a Mac person. However several sites I visit regulary do not support Safari. I usually use Firefox because it seems to be easier to use than Chrome.

@GracieT Thank you for bringing up a valid point.
Some pages are written to work only in one browser, and that is often either IE or Firefox; the two most popular browsers on Earth right now. My wife likes Chrome, but complains that many sites don’t work for her, and anything with a PDF file just chokes and dies under Chrome. As Safari and Chrome use much of the same code, I can’t imagine Safari would fare much better, but I can’t keep it from crashing long enough to find out.

Thanks for the help. I cleared up a lot of space on my hard drive and down-loaded Firefox onto my iMac and it seems to work OK. I down-loaded the supporting software to print out the music scores and went around in circles a few times and started over a few times turning off and on the computer. Unfortunately I still can’t print-out the music that I bought. I think that I’m most likely doing something fundamentally wrong so I’ll try it all again later after I have calmed down a few bits.

I tend to switch between the two. While I love Safari and infinitely prefer its bookmarking system to that of any other browser, I default to Firefox for most tasks simply so that I do not need to worry about compatibility issues.

Mission accomplished! A little perseverance and the courage to try new things did it. THANKS!!!