Most Mac users tend to use the browser that came installed on their computer (Apple's Safari) just because it's there and it's made by Apple. But as a discerning Mac user, Safari isn't your only choice.

With this Group Test we're going to check out the alternatives, to see whether it's worth switching to something new.

Browsers used to be compared on the basis of compatibility, but these days the vast majority of sites work fine across all browsers. Speed, despite the claims of each browser manufacturer, also isn't a major consideration regarding which to use.

During testing, you'll typically find a new browser works faster than an old one, since it's not 'weighed down' with junk. In practice, you'll find few noticeable speed differences between browsers running on a clean Mac OS X install.

Today, features rule the roost, and this is our main consideration in this Group Test. How easy do these browsers make it to find information and to browse the web? How extensible are they? And can they block out annoyances?

Ease of use

Usability is of paramount importance when it comes to everyday tools, and browsers are no exception. Safari, perhaps unsurprisingly, takes the crown in terms of pick-up-and-play simplicity.

Its interface is streamlined and straightforward and its various options are logically housed in the browser's menus and preferences. A worthy rival is Camino, which offers a similarly honed-down interface and aesthetic, and preferences that don't betray its roots as a cousin of the comparatively complex Firefox.

Of the other browsers on test, Opera's been taking the most notes. Its interface, while still a little alien in feel, is far more Mac-like as of version 9.5, and although its preferences are more complex than Safari's, extended ones are shoved into an Advanced category that users can ignore.

Elsewhere, Firefox remains messy, but it's simple enough to use, while Flock's bewildering interface may make newcomers recoil in horror. OmniWeb sits in the middle ground, with a decent balance of usability and flexibility, but it pales alongside Safari and Camino.

Camino - 5/5
Firefox - 4/5
Flock - 3/5
OmniWeb - 4/5
Opera - 4/5
Safari - 5/5

Content searching

Finding content can be broken down into three areas: dredging up items from your history and bookmarks, web searches, and in-page searches.

For the first of those things, all browsers offer address bar auto-complete of varying quality, but Firefox 3 blows the competition away: its smart location bar adapts over time, matching items from keywords, URLs and user-definable tags.

For in-page incremental find-while- you-type searches, Firefox lags behind. The stars are Safari and Opera, which highlight all instances of a term. Opera also offers Quick Find, enabling access to pages based on their content via text strings typed into the address bar.

There's also variance with keyword searches (typing something like 'am apple' to search Amazon for 'apple') and each browser's search field. Gecko-based browsers – Flock, Firefox and Camino – provide a means for updating the built-in search engine field, as does Opera. Camino omits keyword searches entirely.

With Safari, it's Google and no keywords, but with OmniWeb, keyword searches form the basis for the search box at the top- right of each window – a nice touch.

Camino - 1/5
Firefox - 4/5
Flock - 3/5
OmniWeb - 3/5
Opera - 5/5
Safari - 2/5

Blocking content

Users typically want to block two types of content: advertising and phishing websites. All browsers offer basic pop-up blocking and the ability to disable scripts, but that's where Safari stops.

Flock and Firefox provide the means to block images and edit the subsequent block list, and Firefox gets extra points for its phishing and malware protection (the only Mac browser currently offering this), which, while not entirely foolproof, managed to warn us about the majority of dodgy websites we attempted to access.

Opera also enables you to block Flash content on an item-by-item basis, or disable various content types via its Quick Preferences menu.

The two best browsers for blocking content are Camino and OmniWeb, although each offers a very different method. Camino's 'block web advertising' option is an effective single-click affair, although it does also, by default, block inline video on various sites.

Conversely, OmniWeb offers a huge array of features and global blocking preferences that can be overridden per site.

Camino - 4/5
Firefox - 3/5
Flock - 2/5
OmniWeb - 5/5
Opera - 3/5
Safari - 1/5

Bookmarking

Any browser worth its salt must enable you to edit and search bookmarks with ease. With the exception of Camino, all browsers on test provide a group bookmarking function for saving tab sets, either by storing sessions (Opera, OmniWeb) or defining a bookmark folder (Firefox, Flock, Safari). Most also offer tricks of varying sizes and usefulness.

At the smaller end of the scale, there's Camino's ability to compile a top-ten list and bung a user-defined favourites folder in its Dock menu, and Safari's auto-click, which enables you to open everything in a bookmarks folder with a single click.

Meanwhile, OmniWeb provides subscriptions that watch for changes to bookmarks, along with enabling you to configure preferences and define a keyword shortcut for each individual bookmark.

Perhaps most impressive, though, is Firefox, which encourages you to just bung everything in the Unsorted Bookmarks folder and assign tags or keywords to bookmarks. Favourites can then be retrieved by typing tags in Firefox's address bar, rather than rummaging through the Bookmarks menu's sub-menus.

Camino - 2/5
Firefox - 5/5
Flock - 3/5
OmniWeb - 4/5
Opera - 3/5
Safari - 3/5

Flexibility

Firefox is the customisation king. Although some of the vast array of plug-ins aren't yet compatible with version 3 of the browser, chances are they soon will be. With Flock essentially being a pimped-up Firefox, many Firefox plug-ins work fine with it, and Flock also has a diverse range of its own extensions.

Opera has also been nurturing its development community, although much of its output appears centred around widgets, which aren't terribly interesting to Mac users who have Dashboard ready and waiting.

Of the remaining three browsers, none has near the level of support Firefox enjoys, but Safari and Camino both have websites dedicated to extending them (www.pimpmycamino.com and www.pimpmysafari.com).

A mix of shareware and freeware can be used to enhance the browser, although we found Safari tends to suffer stability-wise when extended too much.

Also, many Safari extensions offer functionality that already exists within Firefox. As for OmniWeb, its level of extensibility is almost zero, restricting you to built-in functionality and options.

Camino - 2/5
Firefox - 5/5
Flock - 4/5
OmniWeb - 1/5
Opera - 2/5
Safari - 3/5

Extra features

Ultimately it's the extra features that make browsers stand out for recommendation. Safari boasts some beautiful and handy developer tools, and its RSS reader remains one of the most usable browser-based examples.

Elsewhere, OmniWeb provides a smattering of nuggets from per-site external link control and bookmarks subscriptions to its auto-saveable workspaces and popular visual tabs. And Firefox provides a site ID pop-up from the menu bar, along with parental controls. We also that you can reopen recently closed tabs via the History menu.

Opera and Flock stand out in this section, however. Opera provides mouse gestures, a built-in BitTorrent client, a User mode for developers (enabling varied alternate appearance settings) and Speed Dial, a page for default tabs that enables you to house nine commonly accessed web pages.

Flock, though, takes the crown. It shoe-horns in an astonishing number of features for social networking, enabling you to access Flickr streams and upload images, edit your blog, and keep track of your webmail.

Camino - 1/5
Firefox - 3/5
Flock - 5/5
OmniWeb - 3/5
Opera - 4/5
Safari - 3/5

What else is out there for the Mac?

Although we consider the six browsers in this Group Test the best of the bunch for Mac OS X, alternatives exist. Some are cross-platform projects that have made their way to the Mac, such as AOL Desktop, and Gecko variants SeaMonkey and Songbird (Gecko being the engine that drives Firefox, Flock and Camino).

Of these, Songbird is most interesting. Resembling the result of iTunes and a web browser merging into a single application, Songbird provides the ability to play various music formats (including iTunes downloads) and the means of creating playlists from audio embedded within web pages. Despite being in development since 2006, Songbird still feels rickety, but it bodes watching.

Read TechRadar's hands on Songbird review

Elsewhere, several Mac-specific browsers exist. Shiira is a WebKit browser that once aimed to trump Safari, although development has stalled, meaning it's lost ground on Apple's offering.

Sunrise aims to appeal to web designers, offering visual bookmarks and the ability to snap the browser window to popular screen resolutions. And iCab, now using WebKit, provides features on a par with Safari, along with decent ad-blocking.

Also, if you're the kind of user who enjoys being at the bleeding edge, you can get sneak peeks into the future of browsers by downloading nightly builds and beta versions. The most interesting at the time of writing is Flock 2, which looks like it will include all of Firefox 3's improvements along with updating Flock-specific features.

Standalone apps

As more work is done online via various web applications, such as Gmail and Photoshop Express, browser stability is an increasing concern.

Although everything on test proved stable, no browser is bulletproof, and it only takes a particularly unruly site for everything to come crashing down. While most browsers enable you to continue an unexpectedly quit session, chances are your set-up and content will be gone upon a restart.

To get around this, developers have started creating applications designed to tie directly into particular websites. Some, such as those by iwascoding, are specific to a particular service – in this case, the developer provides tools for buying and selling on eBay and interacting with PayPal, without having to access the actual websites.

Perhaps more interesting is the recent flurry of activity surrounding single-site browsers (SSBs), most popularised on the Mac via Fluid. This freeware application enables you to turn any website into a standalone app, complete with icon, meaning that if your main browser crashes, your SSBs remain unaffected.

Usefully, the application also makes use of Dock badge icons, enabling you to see your unread message count in Gmail or notifications in Flickr.

Although currently something of a niche concern, it's clear SSBs will become more commonplace over time, and the concept appears to have piqued Apple's interest, too. According to developers with early builds of Safari 4, the next major release of Apple's browser will include a feature for creating SSBs.

And the winner is... Firefox 3

It's been a really hard task trying to pick a winner in this Group Test. Each browser on test here offers something unique, and yet they're all flawed in some way.

This problem is further compounded by the fact that the quality of the Mac browsers we tested falls in a somewhat narrow band from 'quite good' to 'very good', but with no single candidate proving itself significantly ahead of the pack.

Also, some users will, regardless of features, prefer a certain type of browser because they're used to the one they currently use. Therefore, the winner of this Group Test is the browser most balanced towards the positive when all the pros and cons are weighed up.

For us, Firefox 3 gets the winner's prize. There are still things we absolutely hate about Firefox, most notably its ghastly visual design, which betrays its cross-platform roots, and its stoic ignorance of Mac conventions.

Despite promises during the alpha run of the browser, it doesn't yet use Mac OS X's built-in spell-checker, and its theme is a botched attempt to fit in with Leopard. But Firefox's sheer speed, ease of use and excellent feature-set ensures it's the fastest and most efficient way of browsing the internet, and when it's reskinned (quick tip: go to www.takebacktheweb.org to give it a makeover and make it look 100 times better), the nasty interface is dealt with.

Worthy nods go to Opera, Flock (which might have won had 2.0 – which adds Firefox 3's improvements – been ready) and Safari, which could have been a contender if it was more feature-rich.

First published inMacFormat, Issue 201

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