internet apps/networking
11/27/2006, 9:25pm, EST
Monday, November 27th
Fonts/text: Safari better than Firefox
Although Firefox offers advanced support for the Document Object Model to MIME types, at least one designer says that Safari is better than Firefox in terms of font rendering. A new blog post at Zeldman.com touts Safari's font display engine, including handling of italics, hyphenation, antialiasing, and more: "Firefox’s way with text leaves much to be desired, as the following screen shots show. Indeed, if reading is mostly what you do on the Web, and if accurate typography makes reading more of a pleasure and less of a strain, then Apple’s Safari is superior to Firefox.... there are multiple, overlapping Firefox bugs happening here—too many to fit into a bug-report form. I suspect that the problems have to do with Mozilla’s reliance on its cross-platform display environment. If you scuttle what an individual operating system does well in favor of what a cross-platform environment does poorly, you get what we’re seeing here. It’s not good enough."
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I will admit Safari support in this area is poor. Nonetheless, I run TinyMCE on my Wordpress based blog. I use Safari exclusively. If I recall, Wordpress has disabled Safari support, not the other way around. You have to manually recode Wordpress to recognize Safari for the purposes of TinyMCE.
I find that Firefox is the fastest & most stable browser and I see the spinning cursor much less often in Firefox than in Safari.
On the other hand, WebKit (the Safari nightly build) includes a JavaScript debugger and HTML/CSS inspector, plus Safari has better RSS handling, which eliminates 3 of my Firefox add-on. And the visual tabs in OmniWeb and Shiira beat the equivalent FF add-on hands-down.
I'm also intrigued as to where you guys go browsing that you have so many problems with Safari (speed, spinning ball, etc).
IE fonts look like crap because Windows font engine is, generally speaking, inferior. (Ditto Powerpoint vs Keynote typography). Some Windows users would disagree, finding the Macs anti-aliased fonts 'blurry' on crap monitors / small font sizes, but generally speaking it's true. Vista will definitely narrow the gap.
Be interesting to see the differences with Adobe's Apollo (which will bring a branch of Webkit to Windows).