Which browser is really the best for Mac?

Today, we spend hours and hours on the Internet, so it is important for us to have a good browsing experience. There is a good selection of browsers for all platforms now. So what one is best for the Mac? Which one is fastest and the easiest to use?

Now, you are all probably thinking “its Safari, duh.” Well let’s find out. Now, I have come to this conclusion from my personal preferences, so everyone’s browser of choice here will be different. My personal preferences are, speed of loading pages and simplicity.

So, how did I test all these browsers equally and fair? I used Peacekeeper, a browser benchmark. It tested you browsers JavaScript functionality. I tested Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari. So here are the results...

As you can see, Chrome is the fastest browser when it comes to JavaScript fuctionality. I was amazed on how much it out performed them by. But, is that my preference? Not really, I like chrome but I have found it crashes far too much for my liking. It just would not respond, I downloaded it twice and both times I had the same problems.  Sure, its simple and easy too use. But, I am not going to use something that I can’t rely on.

I had the same problems with Opera as well, actually it was worse. I found it was just not responding. So maybe I got a bad batch of Chrome and Opera? So, if you use either of those two, does it happen to you?

Safari is pre-installed on every Mac and I would say is one of the most popular browsers for Windows users. When I saw the results for Safari I was a little shocked. I thought it being the ‘official’ Mac browser it would out perform the competition by a large margin. One problem I have had with it is my flash player never seems to work; maybe it is because of Apple’s support for HTML5? Nevertheless, I really like Safari; it’s simple, elegant and easy to use. It’s like any Apple product, really.

Firefox came dead last in my benchmark run, by a lot. But, I found it didn’t crash once and it was very simple to use. So does that mean, slow and steady wins the race?

No, I would recommend all us Mac users stick with Safari, its made for our machines. Its like Internet Explorer for windows, except it works and it’s not painfully slow.  

If I have missed anything or you want to know more, please leave a comment and I will happily answer you question.

Comments

[DOdoms]

Although I like Safari's performance, I dislike the fact that it does not render some pages, e.g., online education websites, some banks, and a few other sites that recommend using IE or Firefox. I dislike having to use multiple browsers. One browser not included in the mix that I think is pretty fast is the Camino browser. It allows me to access sites that Safari cannot, and it is just as fast.