First, the interesting part. As the web watching community knows, what was going to be Firefox 3.1 is now to be Firefox 3.5 as a better “representation of scope”. Of course, that is not what us users have to worry about.
What we have to worry about is that Firefox 3.5 and Apple’s Safari 4 are probably going to be released around the same time. And we have to worry about which is better.
And if we are to listen to the developers, we would have to settle for both. Both are deemed to be “fast”, “secure”, and “powerful”. They are both standards compliant, but both still in beta, so we hardly have much material to work with. As far as I can tell in my tests – they both do their basic job (loading websites) well and fast.
Truth is, one cannot really tell yet. Both have some serious bugs and problems to fix – in particular, stability problems. Safari seems to have introduced plenty of eye-candy, in a particularly useful manner: galleries, top sites, quick dial kind of things. On the other hand, Mozilla seems has been up to a few tricks of it’s own: super-speed, super-security, and a very powerful administration mechanism that makes it completely independent of the host operating system’s settings.
In the end it will come down to whichever is most convenient to use. And that is where, I think, Firefox will take the cake. I am talking about the Firefox Add-Ons. The one true advantage in Firefox. I cannot work my browser without my myriad of addons, such as FireFTP, DownThemAll!, Ubiquity, Fasterfox, and the many personalisations themes and extensions.
I think Firefox will take this round home.
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