Mozilla Firefox (otherwise known as just Firefox) is a free open source internet browser originally developed by Mozilla Foundation. Currently Firefox is available for 3 major operating systems, namely Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, as well as several other UNIX-like operating systems.
Safari is a free web browser for both Mac and Windows PC. It is developed by Apple Inc. and is currently in its 4th version. THe browser is made based on Apple's own WebKit webpage rendering engine, of which was developed based on Konqueror's KHTML (in the form of WebCore) and KJS (in the form of JSC). Since both KHTML and KJS are open-source, WebKit also has been made open-source as well (under GNU Lesser GPL), allowing 3rd-party software developer to use it for instance, to develop another brand new browser, just like in the case when Netscape source-code was made open-source thus gave birth to Mozilla Firefox. However, some parts like the GUI elements of the software continue to remain as Apple's proprietary.
For most people, Safari is just yet another web browser. This is true to some extent though, as it shares common notable features with other modern browsers such as tabbed browsing, built-in pop-up blocker, integrated major search engines, spell checker, auto web form filler, feed reader and many more. However, Safari do have some "Safari-only" features like the "Keychain" password manager, Web-Inspector (a DOM Inspector-like utility), iPhoto integration as well as Apple Dashboard integration, where most of them are like some sort of rebadged similar features often found in other major browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Opera. They also usually only benefits Apple-esque web.
The first public release was in 2003, where it was only made available on Mac OS X. A Windows-ported version was only released in 2007. On that time, Safari is already in it's 3rd version. From various unofficial sources on the net, it appears that Windows users has been requesting for a Windows version of Safari, although those requests are made solely for the purpose of "satisfying the geek thirst". In real world application though, performance wise, Safari itself has never been a better browser actually, as it is always at average with other browsers.
The most notable controversy about Apple Safari is Apple's official web browser comparison chart which was publicly displayed on the company's corporate website sometime back in 2004. On that time, Safari was compared with other browsers with the fast browser reputation like Opera and Mozilla Firefox, of which both were already in their 8th and 2nd version respectively. However, surprisingly, Apple used Opera 7 and Firefox 1.5 to make the comparison. This biased and doubtful comparison was seriously offending that it resulted some European and Asian countries banned the advertisement of the software. Some long time Windows users admitted that this was expected because for them, "this is not the first time Apple tells us a lie". Even the more recent comparison still compares Safari with Firefox 2, as if Firefox 3 does not exist. A group of Firefox fans have been mocking about this on the net but there is no official respond from Apple so far (probably because they are eating back their words?). To make it worst, Apple still self-proclaimed Safari as "the world's fastest browser" although they are constantly being confronted by professionals for such false claim. In fact, even the Apple official website sometimes may took ages to be fully loaded when browsed through Safari, especially on first visit (upon first install or cleaned cache/cookies) while Firefox or Opera never really have this problem when visiting there.
Since version 4, Apple has included major changes and revamped around 25% of the interface of the software. It now somehow resembles the Mobile Safari, the iPhone version of Safari. It also support native Windows look for Windows version. There is also a 'CoverFlow' (like the one found in the iTunes) for browsing the history and bookmarks. The JSC engine also has been superseded by SquirrelFish, a new JavaScript engine. Apple, just like Google on Chrome, emphasize heavily on speeding up the JavaScript execution process. Both Google and Apple claimed that this greatly speeds up internet browsing experience, though this will only has significant impact if the website is heavily scripted with JavaScript (which only a fractionof websites do).
Still, despite in version 4, Apple still stubborn (or stupid) enough not to include a pulldown menu button in the addressbar, where this feature has been proven extremely useful in all other browsers. With this feature, user does not need to retype addresses or opening the history just to browsethe previously visited website. Not only that, Safari shares the same flaw with Google Chrome, where it can only recognize the first few letters of a typed URL in the address bar in order to suggest the previously opened URLs. Firefox and Opera are much better in this, where both browsers will suggest any previously visited URLs if the user only typing the 2nd level domain of a URL or even the sub-page URL.
Safari still have lots of rooms for improvements, and it would be better if they (Apple) would consider to tend to any kind of complaints regarding this browser. No, we are not asking them to make Safari as "another Firefox" but just want them to properly implement 'proven-useful' features. It is pointless to be different where in fact you are just being bad.
Download Safari for free here:
http://www.apple.com/safari/download/
We have reviewed the Flock browser before and now we feel it is time to review the mother of all Firefox-based browsers, the original Mozilla Firefox browser. We have been a long time Firefox user, ever since it's initial release in November 2009. Currently Firefox is in the version 3.5, with the version 3.5.3 being the latest stable release by the time of writing this article.
The current Firefox is originally descended from the Mozilla Application Suite, which was born upon the release of the source code of the Gecko web rendering engine used in the legendary Netscape browser. Even today Firefox still uses the engine since it complies to most current web standards. In fact, Firefox also implemented some of the features that would eventually become standards.
Firefox is among the first few browsers that features tabbed-browsing, which has been around since its very first version. Actually tabbed-browsing feature was available in Mozilla Application suite as an extension and with the advent of Firefox, the feature is made built-in for the people who developed it think that this is a must in any web browser. Indeed it is a must and it is hard to imagine any modern web browser without it.
Simply put, it is also hard to write an article covering all Firefox features, for it will span thousands of words. Therefore we will highlight only a few of notable features that sets Firefox apart from the rest of other browsers. Firefox has the reputation of being one of the safest browser available. New updates constantly available thanks to the ever increasing supports and contributions from the Firefox developer community. If only Linux can be updated in a similar manner we believe many people would embrace it too.
Other most notable feature on Firefox is its page loading speed. By default it is already fast enough to beat many other major browsers in page rendering and with a little tweak it can be the fastest of all. Yes, user-customizability is another Firefox's killer feature. So far, apart from Firefox derived browsers, we never seen any browser as highly customizable as this one. There are tons of plug-ins (extensions) to extend it functionality plus loads more themes to replace the default look and fell, if that is what you are into. Not to mention that power user may delve into its internal configurations for some extras, just like what people are doing with Windows Registry.
At this moment we have almost no complain for Firefox except for its one band reputation; being the memory hog. Yes, one running Firefox instance with certain amount of extensions installed may hog your system memory up to 100MB, even without displaying any page, hampering your PC performance. Even after closing it Firefox does not instantly give up the memory and may take some time to clear everything before it is completely 'shut down'. This is getting worse by the fact that Firefox runs only on single processing thread, though multi-threaded version has been planned for the future. Luckily since Firefox is highly customizable, there are tweaks to compensate this problem if you really need to get rid of them. Our advice is, only install the extensions you really use and Firefox will work just fine. Spread Firefox!
Download Firefox for free here:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/personal.html