News & Views

Show of hands: How many of you Macites use Safari, Apples Web browser, to surf the vast network of cookie recipes and rebate deals known as the Internet? Id say a good 90% of you are quite comfortable with its slick brushed-metal interface and its speedy rendering of picture-full pages, as well as its tabbed-browsing and darned-good pop-up blocking. (The other 10% is probably stuck in OS 9, using Netscape or Internet Explorer -- my heart goes out to you fine, unfortunate folks.)

After polling some of my friends and random strangers by the bus- stop, I was alarmed to see that so many people use Safari, but have so little experience with other, more mature browsers (sans IE).

Cue the collaborative gasp: What? There are other browsers? Nahhh.

On contraire, friends, there are several other browsers -- several other good browsers -- that deserve a pat on the back and a free lunch at Portillos. Lets take a look at em, shall we?

Firefox

Firefox is the open-source Web browser thats gettin a whole lotta press these days as being the #1 alternative to Internet Explorer -- at least on Windows. See, them Windows folks are having problems with Bad People doing Bad Things to their computers, all because of Microsofts policy allowing (encouraging, demanding) its programmers to drink on the job. (Disclaimer to Microsoft lawyers: Joke! Ha! Ha )
Because IE is so susceptible to viruses and hackers -- (I once wrote that using IE is kinda like leaving your door unlocked and opened widely with a sign that says, Steal Things) -- everyone with half a brain and a desire to help -- or at least a reluctance to harm -- others is adamantly promoting the use of Firefox instead.

Firefox on the Mac may not be the bastion of secure browsing as it on Windows, but only because the Mac is just as secure as-is. What Firefox does offer, however, is expandability that, when the two browsers are placed side-by-side, causes doctors to mistake Safari as a tuberculosed lung. Firefox enables users to install a wide array of plug-ins that can make the browser dance on its head while effortlessly juggling motor saws and flaming breadsticks. For example, a plug-in called miniT enables you to reorder the position of your browser tabs; AdBlock removes those flashy punch-the-monkey ads right from web pages; ForecastFox provides access to a one-click weather forecast right in the browser toolbar. The list goes on
Firefox also supports various themes, so if youre a closet artist and youre looking for a way to express your buried anguish and suppressed teen angst, you can customize your browsers appearance to best represent that emotional distress. Or if you just, you know, get bored with Firefoxs default theme, and youre easily impressed by shiny colors and glowy buttons. Whatever floats your boat.

You can download Firefox for free from www.getfirefox.com.

Camino

I hesitated to add this one. There was a time when Camino was the bees knees, the cats pajamas, the eels ankle, and the skunks stripe -- but since Safari made its debut and Firefox stole the spotlight, Camino has been slowly losing its already-isolated importance in the Mac world. However, I came to realize that if I didnt mention it, Id be e-mailed bombed by every Mac Fanatic who has been a Camino fan for so long but doesnt have the will -- or the power -- to let go; so I figured Id save us all a little headache and put it in
for old times sake.

Camino is the proficient (but sadly under-loved) son of the Mozilla Foundation; the B-student brother of the straight-A, Heisman-winning Firefox. Camino has basically one strength that Firefox and Mozilla lack: its made by a Mac developer solely for the Mac community. There is no Windows or Linux port, and that gives the developer the rare opportunity of tinkering with Mac OS X-specific features, allowing him to optimize it in ways that Firefox can only dream of. (The supposed effect of that, of course, is better performance.)

Unfortunately, thats all Camino really has going for it. Those who stick with it seem to do so because of an unexplainable loyalty to the platform: it was around before Safari, and it touted superior features that Safari later adopted. But the gap has closed, and Safari has caught up -- and passed -- Camino in terms of features and, from my experience, speed and performance.

Camino is free from www.caminobrowser.org.

OmniWeb

I beat my brain for hours trying to think of a suitable analogy for OmniWeb, but the best I could come up with was along the lines of, OmniWeb is as great as the thing thats so great. You know...the thing.

While that may not be thoroughly descriptive, it certainly makes the point. OmniWeb is the Toyota Prius of Web browsers; it has so many features, it makes the newspaper seem lackluster. The Omni Group took the basic, boring-ol concept of a Web browser and refined it to a point of unprecedented superiority, adding functionality up the ying- yang. OmniWeb has a suite of features that take Internet surfing to the next level of Awesomeness, expanding the concept of browsing beyond Type address, hit enter, click link.

Take, for example, their dazzling implementation of the famed tabbed- browsing. In other browsers like Firefox and Safari, tabs are just that: tabs under the address bar above the page contents. In OmniWeb, however, tabs are actually thumbnail images of the page itself, conveniently placed in a drawer on the side of the browser window. As if that isnt enough to convince you of the divinely-blessed nature of OmniWeb, consider what you can do with the tabs: If you have multiple windows open, you can actually drag tabs between the various windows. You can also take one window and place it in the tab drawer of another, or take a tab and separate it into its own window -- features that Safari users resort to dubbing as witchcraft so as to stifle off embarrassment.

Want more? Well how about a nifty aspect of OmniWeb called Workspaces, which enables you to save browsing instances -- what pages are open, what tabs are open, and even the browser windows position and size -- so they can be loaded later with a single click. Not useful, you say? Well
youre wrong. Workspaces are great
for people who visit a wide array of related Web sites at once, eliminating the need for them to manually open the pages (in the way they prefer) each and every time theyre interested in viewing them. A bonus to this is a feature called Auto-save while browsing, which remembers the characteristics of your browser as you surf the and immediately loads it after you quit and reopen OmniWeb -- so, for example, if your browser somehow crashes, relaunching it will return you to the state you were in right before the crash, saving you the headache of having to find the pages all over again.

OmniWeb has a boatload of other ingenious features: Web site-specific preferences, Web form-enhancers, an advanced and customizable search box, the ability to highlight a link by typing its first few letters, sophisticated bookmark and history management, a cure for cancer, cheap gasoline, and a waffle iron that IHOP would be jealous of.

OmniWeb, unlike most other Mac browsers, isnt free -- but its one of the few in the world worth paying for. You can purchase it for $30 from www.omnigroup.com.

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Dan Pourhadi is a freelance technology writer from the Chicago suburbs. Aside from writing for Passages, he has contributed to MacAddict Magazine and writes a weekly column for Macteens.com. He maintains a fitfully-updated, though semi-interesting blog at www.pourhadi.com.
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Regards,
Dan Pourhadi