I use both a PC and a Mac (OS X 10.3.4) and I was wondering… is there any way to make the Mac not use that ghastly bugfest called Safari as the default browser?
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26 comments to A question for Mac Heads |
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Yes, in IE at least there is a option to “make IE defaut browser”. You have to do it via the browser you rather than via the actually OS.
Safari bugfest? Not in my experience.
I would reckon you could just dowload a version of netscape (or explorer) from limewire (.com – you pay your money and you share the files) and use that instead.
mf
I would reckon you could just dowload a version of netscape (or explorer) from limewire (.com – you pay your money and you share the files) and use that instead.
mf
You could try the Mac version of Mozilla Firefox
Download @ http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/0.9.3/firefox-0.9.3-mac.dmg.gz
or just read mozilla.org for more info/
I am aware that there are other browsers for the Mac but that was not what I asked. How do you make others the default browser… and Andrew game me the answer at least for IE (do it via the browser, not the OS).
I do indeed want to make Firefox the default one for the Mac.
Andrew: As you know tBBC(Link) sets up blogs and trains businesses how to do the ‘Blog Thang’… and we have more Safari related problems than with every other kind of browser put together (regardless of OS!)
I’ll second the recommendation of Firefox. It’s great!
Perry,
Go into Safari preferences, General and under “Default Browser” select Firefox. That should work.
You used to be able to do this with “Internet Preferences” in System Preferences under 10.2 but that has disappeared in 10.3.
By, the way, I’m at a loss as to why you consider Safari so buggy, it works fine for me and I can’t really tell performance apart for any of the Mozilla based browsers including Firefox and Safari. The only differences I see relate to features.
Likewise. Safari likes me just fine. But hey, Firefox ain’t shabby either…
Perry: Don’t know if you’re going with Firefox because you like cross-platform consistency, but there is also a native Mozilla browser for Mac called Camino that’s worth looking at. I flip back and forth between that and Safari.
Cheers Frank!
As for why I hate Safari… we set up a blog for as client with a style switcher that altered the layout and font sizes… it worked in IE, Netscape, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Firebird, Opera, Camino… but not in Safari. And this is not the only time we have run into that.
For some reason Firefox 0.9.1/0.9.2 was crashing on my laptop (Dell Inspiron 8600 running Windows XP Home SP1) whenever I opened a form of moderate complexity. This was was the opposite of what was happening on my desktop machine (both under SuSe Linux and Windows 2000) where Firefox appeared to be the most stable and useful browser around. However, I have upgraded to WXP SP2 and to Firefox 0.9.3, and the problem has gone away. I’m not sure which of the two upgrades fixed it. Did anyone else see anything like this?
BTW, Safari isn’t a mozilla-based browser. It’s based on the Konqueror browser KDE uses.
The issues, I’d suspect stem from the fact that Konq’s CSS support aint all that hot.
I have checked a few CSS-P sites in Safari and noticed no fatal or even all that noticeable discrepencies betwixt that browser and what I expected based on others. It seems to handle CSS and other standards just as well, on average, as other modern browsers.
So, you put together one blog that didn’t work, and that’s your evidence that Safari is a “bug fest”?
I am not a Safari advocate, but I am a Web developer unfortunately maligned with insufficient access to Mac machines, so to read a comment like that just irritates me, that’s all. Just seems to add noise to the signal. Give me something relevant, yeknow?
The setting is in Safari’s own Preferences (accessible under the “Safari” menu), at the “General” tab. It’ll let you pick anything that claims to be able to open HTML files.
Yes, this means you can’t change the setting (the official way 🙂 if you delete Safari. It’ll change to some installed browser, but there’s no system preference dialog to select which one. So just keep Safari installed and only use it to set the default browser. (There are programming-level APIs for this, of course – browser handling isn’t special, it’s just “the program that handles HTML by default”).
Cheers
— perry
You may also want to try Omniweb. They just released version 5 yesterday and I love what they’ve done with tabbed browsing.
Whatever you do … WHATEVER you do … do not, and I can not stress this strongly enough, NOT use Omniweb. Omniweb is to Mac OS X what using some dreadful browser written by a 10 year old is to Windows XP. By far the nicest rendering web browser for OSX is Camino
, but for day-to-day banking and other important yet mundane tasks use Internet Explorer 5.2.3. You change your browser prefs through the Safari preferences, by the way.
Funny how Apple is doing exactly what MS got “convicted” of, eh?
Julian,
The latest Omniweb uses the Safari ( webCore) engine to display it’s pages – no use to Perry, of course since it would have the same bugs as Safari in rendering – but hardly credibly described as something designed by a 10 year old. It has really clever extra features, actually, but nothing to make me pay for it.
And yes, this is what Microsoft got caught for, if Apple had 98% of the market it would be the monopoly par excellence – most of the applications that I use on OS X are designed by Apple, and there doesn’t seem to be any killer app in the offing from third party application developers. Not a healthy situation even if the Apple designed apps are very good – which they are.
Nope, you presume overmuch. That was just the most recent and annoying incidence of browser pestilence. We have had problems on several other projects where things worked in every other browser, but not Safari
Such as?
I would be interested to know what is not working with Safari. I know several developers who have no such problems. They are both on PC & Mac.
Eoin,
My objections to The Omni Group are based largely upon not wanting to pay $29.95 for a web browser which from Mac OS X 10.0 through to 10.1.5 had massive problems with it (crashing, failure to save bookmarks etc.), while Camino (formerly Chimera) remains free of charge and does everything that Omniweb does, with the exception of Flash blocking.
As for the 10 year old remark I would refer to this (link) which shows you how easy it is to build a browser for OS X from scratch.
Heh, just the other night when working on a customer web site I mentioned a display irregularity a page was having in Konqueror to the designer for the page. I got the exact same mis-behaviour from Safari.
Safari/Kon. have various random problems with different web applications (‘random’ in that no other browser seems to have them).
Just try to electronically sign the Note for a student loan backed by SallieMae with Safari and then come back and tell me it doesn’t have issues. For no discernable reason it wouldn’t submit a form to continue to the next screen, in the middle of a long multi-page set of forms.
Show html didn’t reveal anything werid to me, it just wouldn’t do ‘next’ on that one page. Firefox handled it with no trouble, and IE/Netscape/Moz were already tested on it. Javascript, css, who knows or cares, as from the users point of view it’s “just broken”.
The Safari problems have always been CSS related… which is annoying to say the least.
Safari is certainly broken on some javascript issues, I use IE, and keep it on my Mac, only for any secure transaction regarding bank sites etc.
However, it may not be that Safari is wrong in it’s interpretation of the typical CSS code, it may be following the proper standard whilst IE is not – but IE’s bugs can becomes the defacto standard, due to its predominance – other browsers follow the IE mistakes to maintain compliance with most of the market, and IE’s own enigneers cannot break the new “standard” either.
i could, be talking crap. of course – since I do not know much about CSS, but that is some of what i gather from comments on technical sites re Safari and CSS.
I just noticed from Dreamweaver MX that it does have a separate code checking utility especially for Safari.
I’ve also found under 10.3.5 that even if I do change the default browser to IE, Opera or Camino it will still open in Safari if Safari is currently open. I wonder if there is a way in Terminal to prevent this?
I haven’r read all the comments but I was searching how to make firefox my default browser on mac OS X…you have to go to system preferences, then go to internet, then go to the web tab and it will ask you what you want ur default browser to be