Fonts/text: Safari better than Firefox
updated 09:25 pm EST, Mon November 27, 2006
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."
Font rendering
11/27, 10:49pm reply
I agree completely that Safari has superior font rendering as I develop websites. I always show clients my designs in Safari. While Firefox tends to look a bit more like IE (which is horrid with text). Apple has done a good job with text, now if they could tweak the Javascript support I would give it a 10 out of 10.
ClevelandAdv
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Joined: Jul 2004
Fix Javascript...amen!
11/27, 10:54pm reply
It's really inexcusable that after all these years Safari still can't run a web-based HTML Editor (ie. TinyMCE). If it weren't for Firefox, Mac users would be locked out of the CMS editing world.
msherer
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Joined: Mar 2006
Yes, but
11/27, 10:59pm reply
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.
Terrin
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Joined: Jan 2006
I'm shocked, shocked!
11/27, 11:58pm reply
You mean a browser written to a specific OS/display engine is better than a cross-platform program??? The next thing you know someone's going to be coming out saying OS X programs written to Aqua look better then those running X11!
LouZer
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Joined: Nov 2000
Louzer's right
11/28, 06:47am reply
Too many compromises in cross-platform s/w.
krispie
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Joined: Sep 2006
The best of both?
11/28, 08:15am reply
Why is there no mention of Camino? I like Safari and Firefox a lot but the browser I've settled on for nearly everything I do is Camino. I find it faster than Safari with all OSX native goodness. It's too bad the project doesn't get much attention these days.
Okonomiyaki
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Joined: Apr 2003
Fox is faster then Safari
11/28, 09:04am reply
I like Firefox more then Safari becouse is faster. Did you know that you can significantly speed up Firefox? You can find manual how to easily tweak Firefox over here: http://www.miscproject.com/blog/about/
melon
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Joined: Aug 2006
I like Firefox
11/28, 11:27am reply
I really dislike Safari because it's a lot slower than Firefox and doesn't support add-ons, which I can't live without. I also dislike Camino because it also doesn't support add-ons and is a lot less stable.
I find that Firefox is the fastest & most stable browser and I see the spinning cursor much less often in Firefox than in Safari.
mike3k
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Joined: May 1999
..if Louzer is right..
11/28, 12:41pm reply
Then what is the reason that IE fonts look like c***, or do we really need to answer that?
ClevelandAdv
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Joined: Jul 2004
Add-ons
11/28, 03:18pm reply
Mike - Camino does support add-ons (and so does Safari to a degree). They just don't support Firefox add-ons! (Camino supports some).
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 c*** 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 c*** 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).
JulesLt
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Joined: Jul 2005