[Mac] What's your favorite Mac web browser?

[dvvega]

Since I do websites for clients I have an installation of many browsers. The one I use for day to day browsing is Safari because it is fast, efficient, and designed for OS X from the ground up. The tabbed browsing is also a winner, and the quick-keys are well thought out so you can control the whole thing via keyboard.

Out of necessity I use IE for certain websites (mainly e-commerce ones) because many programmers have tied their code to IE functionality for these kinds of sites.

Most of the other browsers are there to test CSS out, and ensure I have the right "hacks" in my CSS files.

The thing that irks me about Safari is its lack of extensions for certain media types. Even when it claims that flash/shockwave are installed certain websites don't pick it up and send you to install it. Open up IE and the problem is gone. Apart from these poorly designed sites, Safari has been my browser of choice (it also doesn't support PDF reading, and the plugin that is available isn't as good as the IE PDF support).

An other irksome thing with Safari is that it will download anything it doesn't recognise by default. So if you click on a DOC file it will download it instead of asking if you wish to or not. Not a big deal, but irksome when I have to tab around, open the document, read it, then go back to surfing.

The last irk is with OS X itself. I am a combination mouse/keyboard user (it's faster), however you can't activate dropdowns with the keyboard unlike in Windows, you have to use the mouse - unless I've missed the shortcuts for this.

 

[barsoomcore]

you can't activate dropdowns with the keyboard unlike in Windows

Under Preferences>Advanced, select "Highlight links as you press the Tab key". Now when you press Tab, your focus should jump to each active item in the page in turn.

When it gets to a dropdown, hit the Space bar. The dropdown will, er, drop down, and you can use the arrow keys to select the option you want. Hit the Space bar again and away you go.

 

[Ron]

I use Safari nearly all the time, although I've noticed that it doesn't work in some chat sites. Surprisingly, neither does IE or Firefox, although Mozilla appears to handle them nicely.