Mac Beta Browser Bake-Off!

Currently there are a whole slew of Mac OS X browsers in beta right now: Safari 4, Firefox 3.1/3.5, Camino 2.0 and OmniWeb 5.9sp. After playing around with them a bit, here’s a brief overview:

Safari 4

SunSpider Score: 790ms

When this beta was released by Apple a couple weeks ago it caught everyone by surprise. I’ve never been a big Safari user, so I figured it would be pretty safe for me to test out. Unfortunately for me, it has a strange issue with Mail.app and GrowlMail causing Mail to crash when it checks for new mail (here’s a workaround).

Safari 4 is fast. Super fast, even. I don’t mind the tabs at the top of the window, but I do mind that there is no title bar. I would prefer something like Google Chrome with tabs at the top and a title bar. I also don’t like how dramatically the title bar sizes change. Maybe Apple will address some of this in future betas.

Other than its newfound speed, Safari 4 didn’t have much else for me to care about, so I still don’t use it.

Camino 2.0b2

SunSpider Score: 3219ms

I’ve always liked Camino. It’s not my main browser choice, but I often use it for sites that act a little funny in other browsers. Since Camino has the Gecko (Firefox) rendering engine, it oftentimes works better on some sites. It’s way slower than the other browsers here in the benchmark, but it doesn’t feel slow in use.

Firefox 3.1b3

Sunspider Score: 1550ms

The rumors are this will soon have its version changed to 3.5. Until Google Chrome was released I always used Firefox on Windows, but not really all that much on OS X. I’m not sure why because it really is a cool browser that is easily extendible. The new beta does feel pretty fast, though. I think this new version has a lot of potential on Mac OS X.

OmniWeb 5.9.2sp

SunSpider Score: 878ms

Shortly after Safari 4 was released, the Omni Group announced that OmniWeb would now be free (instead of $15). I’ve been using OmniWeb since I switched to Mac OS X in 2001. It’s a great browser, but the 5.8 version was a bit slow compared to the Safari, Camino and Firefox betas.

Omni didn’t put OmniWeb out to pasture, though! The latest sneaky peak (beta) builds use the same Webkit version as Safari 4. So OmniWeb is now fast! In fact, it’s second only to Safari in this group.

Summary

Add in the great workspaces feature and the tabs on the side and OmniWeb continues its reign of “Best Mac Browser”, at least for me. And now that it’s free, you should also give it a try.