Firefox vs Safari

From WikiVS, the open comparison website

Firefox and Safari are cross-platform internet browsers.

Contents 1 Performance 2 Features 2.1 Firefox lets you: 2.2 Safari lets you: 3 Extensions 4 Standards Compliance and Support 5 User Interface 5.1 Annoyances 6 HTML Rendering 7 Portability 8 Open-Source

[edit] Performance

Apple claims that Safari is currently the fastest browser available and is confirmed on both Windows and Mac operating systems . The performance difference is especially noticeable on SSL-encrypted websites, where Firefox suffers from sluggish performance.

[edit] Features

Firefox and Safari have many features in common, but there are some features that exist in one browser and not the other.

[edit] Firefox lets you:

• install extensions that provide additional features and functionality from a huge selection of "Add-ons"

[edit] Safari lets you:

• drag a tab out of a multi-tabbed window to let the page be housed in its own window
• "Type a word into the new Find banner below the Bookmarks Bar, and Safari shows you the number of matches and brightly highlights matching terms while dimming the rest of the page" [1]

[edit] Extensions

Both browsers support extensions. Firefox's extension library is much larger than that of any other browser.

[edit] Standards Compliance and Support

Standards compliance and full standards support are two distinct concepts that are often confused with one another. Standards support implies a particular set of standards have been implemented by the browser, while standards compliance implies that any part of the standard that is implemented conforms to the specifications for that functionality in the standard.

Both Firefox and Safari are substantially, if not entirely, standards compliant. Neither, however, entirely supports all relevant web standards.

Safari passes the ACID 3 test. Firefox currently passes less than 70 of the 100 test cases. This would seem to indicate greater standards support by Safari than Firefox, though the ACID tests only test for a largely arbitrary subset of complete standards.

[edit] User Interface

Firefox 3 will support native widgets to provide a seamless user interface for every operating system. However, Firefox does not change its color to indicate whether it is active or inactive as other applications on Mac OSX do. Safari integrates well into the Mac OSX operating system, but maintains the Mac theme even on Windows.

[edit] Annoyances

Safari has an annoying bookmark management interface, where the bookmark manager will replace the current page of the browser instead of opening a dialog like Firefox does.

The standard search functionality for managing Firefox cookie exceptions is crippled, making it difficult to manage cookie policy exceptions when many exceptions have been specified.

[edit] HTML Rendering

Firefox uses the Gecko rendering engine. Safari uses a modified version of the KHTML rendering engine called Webkit.

[edit] Portability

Firefox can be run on most major operating systems including Linux, Solaris, and the various BSD Unix OSes, in addition to MS Windows and MacOS X. Safari only works on Windows and Macs.

[edit] Open-Source

Firefox is an open-source application. Apple has released Safari's rendering engine, Webkit, as an open-source library, but the application itself is not open-source.