11 Mac Browsers Compared

This article was updated last night and first posted on Simon Royal's website. We have rearranged the information to cluster WebKit browsers and Mozilla browsers together. We will update this article when newer versions and new browsers (such as Google's Chrome, which is currently Windows only).

I have always had an interest in web browsers for Mac OS X. Since the demise of Internet Explorer in 2001, nothing has really taken its place. While Internet Explorer 5.2.3 still works okay, not being updated it lacks support for today's standards and features. Firefox is close on its tail, but stubborn web developers still lazily code only for Internet Explorer for Windows.

This article aims to show which Mac browsers are best, in terms of stability, speed, general features, and compatibility.

Here's how I did my test: I updated all browsers to the very latest revision, closed all other apps, and set the homepage to www.google.co.uk with no other fancy add-ons or trimmings. I even logged all browsers out of my iGoogle page to ensure it was as basic as possible.

The test machine was my Intel iMac 1.83 GHz with 2 GB of RAM running Mac OS X 10.5.3, and the time shown for each browser was from when I first clicked the icon in the dock until Google finished loading.

1. Internet Explorer 5.2.3
2. Opera 9.52

WebKit Browsers

3. Safari 3.1.2
4. Shiira 2.2
5. iCab 4.1.1
6. Radon 1.5

Mozilla Browsers

7. Firefox 3.0
8. Netscape Navigator 9.0.0.5
9. SeaMonkey 1.1.11
10. Flock 1.1.2
11. Camino 1.6.3

Internet Explorer 5.2.3

Time to load application & homepage: 5.2 seconds

Microsoft stopped development of Internet Explorer for Mac in 2001. In 2006 they removed the download from their site altogether. It was superb in its day, but now it lacks some of the newer features of recent browsers. It doesn't have tabbed browsing or remember passwords, and it has trouble rendering some pages.

It didn't perform very well in the speed test, and it was the slowest browser loading Google - but after that who knows how fast pages will load and whether they will look as they should.

Rating: Speed 9/10. Stability: 7/10. Compatibility: 5/10 Features: 4/10. Overall 5/10. (2 LEMs on our scale of 0-4)

Opera 9.52

Time To Load Application & Homepage: 1.8 seconds

I gave Opera another try and was pleasantly surprised. The latest version has superb speed and much better compatibility, but it still has a long way to go. Like Safari you have to manually enter the HTML rather than using their WYSIWYG editor in eBay.

I have been using it for a little while and while it is pretty good, there are too many other browsers with better looking UI.

Results: Speed 10/10. Stability: 9/10. Compatibility: 7/10 Features: 8/10. Overall 9/10. (3-1/2 LEMs on our scale of 0-4)

WebKit Browsers

Safari 3.1.2

Time To Load Application & Homepage: 1.2 seconds

Safari is immensely fast and rock solid. I have tried both Safari and Safari 2.0 and was very disappointed in these, but Safari 3 has changed my views of the Apple browser. It has some standard features such as tabbed browsing, username and password remembering and autocomplete in the address bar.

A bad point, is that when using eBay to sell, you have to manually enter the HTML rather than using their WYSIWYG editor. Another bad point, is occasionally it will fail to load pages that other browsers have no problem with, but this seems to be random.

The latest updates have improved speed but the random page drops still exist and are very annoying.

Results: Speed 9/10. Stability: 9/10. Compatibility: 8/10 Features: 8/10. Overall 9/10. (3-1/2 LEMs on our scale of 0-4)

Shiira 2.2

Time to load application & homepage: 1.4 seconds

Shiira is built around the Safari engine, and version 1.2.2 wasn't too bad. However version 2.2 isn't too great. I assume it is still based around Safari 2.0, whereas Apple has moved to Safari 3.0. You can tell the difference. It is a little slower all around than Safari, and when I was trying it, it was very unstable. In the 30 minutes I was trying it, it crashed 9 times.

I gave up on it. It's a nice looking browser with a few different features, like the preview of each page instead of just tabs (although you can enable tabs if you want), but the developers really need to work on stability.

Rating: Speed 8/10. Stability: 4/10. Compatibility: 8/10 Features: 7/10. Overall 6/10. (2 LEMs on our scale of 0-4)

iCab 4.1.1

Time to load application & homepage: 0.7 seconds

I haven't had too much experience with iCab. I stumbled across it recently when looking for an OS 9 browser. Besides the OS X version, they are one of the last developers to still write OS 9 software, and a fairly up-to-date version (3.0.5) is available.

The OS X version was the fastest in the speed tests at under a second to load the app and Google. This will be my new "tryout" browser, to give it a good run.

Rating: Speed 10/10. Stability: 8/10. Compatibility: 9/10 Features: 8/10. Overall 8/10. (3 LEMs on our scale of 0-4)

Radon 1.50

Time To Load Application & Homepage: 1.8 seconds

A new boy in the Mac browser world, Radon is a lightweight browser. It is still early days but it looks very promising.

It is a very fast browser even on older machines, there are some speed improvements in the newest version. It has no fancy add-ons, but it also lacks essentials such as bookmarks and tabs. I think this is deliberate to keep the speed up.

Results: Speed 10/10. Stability: 9/10. Compatibility: 8/10 Features: 3/10. Overall 7/10. (2-1/2 LEMs on our scale of 0-4)

Mozilla Browsers

Firefox 3.0.1

Time To Load Application & Homepage: 2.4 seconds

Everybody knows Firefox. It is fast becoming a serious contender against Internet Explorer. It is also a good word for the open source community and a brilliant browser to which is hard to beat. Even on the PC it had features over a year before Internet Explorer caught up (like tabbed browsing and proper PNG transparencies). It's fast and very stable.

My wife uses it all the time and I have had no complaints from her. The speed is very good, not as streamlined as Safari or Camino, but a very nice and very stable browser. It is much faster and stable than version 1 and 2.

Results: Speed 9/10. Stability: 9/10. Compatibility: 9/10 Features: 8/10. Overall 9/10.

Netscape Navigator 9.0.0.5

Time to load application & homepage: 4.4 seconds

Netscape Navigator used to be a top dog in the browser world, but Internet Explorer trounced it and almost pushed it out completely. Netscape tried to release Navigator as a commercial browser, but it never really worked.

Netscape Navigator has been out of the Mac OS X world for a while, but it's now rebuilt using the Gecko engine (the one behind Firefox).

Navigator is a nice browser, but it did not fare very well in my loading test, being the second slowest. Loading pages was a little slow, and although I didn't test it with a number of tabs, I got the general feeling it wouldn't cope with too many of them.

Rating: Speed 7/10. Stability: 8/10. Compatibility: 9/10 Features: 8/10. Overall 8/10. (3 LEMs on our scale of 0-4)

SeaMonkey 1.1.11

Time To Load Application & Homepage: 0.8 seconds

SeaMonkey is another offering from the Mozilla camp. It features tabbed browsing and is very fast. However the UI is quite plain and ugly.

I'm not sure where Mozilla are going with this, but for older machines looking for a nippier Firefox then this might be an option.

Results: Speed 9/10. Stability: 8/10. Compatibility: 8/10 Features: 7/10. Overall 8/10. (3 LEMs on our scale of 0-4)

Flock 1.2.4

Time To Load Application & Homepage: 3.1 seconds

I used Flock for a long time, it has some superb features above other browsers. It is actually labelled as a 'social browser' as you access your Photobucket and Blogger accounts (as well others) direct from the browser window rather than loading their respective pages.

It is built around the same engine as Firefox with social add-ons.

It is a little slower and sluggish than other Mac browsers and with a few tabs open it really slows down and occasionally unexpectedly quits. The newer versions have increased the speed and stability but not 100%.

A great browser for the extra 'social' features it offer, but you need a fast machine to properly take advantage of them.

Results: Speed 6/10. Stability: 8/10. Compatibility: 9/10 Features: 10/10. Overall 8/10. (3 LEMs on our scale of 0-4)

Camino 1.6.3

Time to load application & homepage: 0.9 seconds

Camino is another offering from the Mozilla crowd, but this time only for Mac OS X. It is a fairly simple and clean looking browser, which has the usual tabs and remembers password.

The biggest trick up its sleeve is its speed - even on older G3 machines. It is amazingly quick, and even with a number of tabs open it still handles very well.

Rating: Speed 10/10. Stability: 9/10. Compatibility: 9/10 Features: 8/10. Overall 9/10. (3-1/2 LEMs on our scale of 0-4)

Conclusion

My choices are between Safari and Camino for pure speed, stability, and compatibility. Firefox is still the best all-rounder for compatibility, but it is a little slower than Safari or Camino, especially on older machines (although Firefox 3 is very fast).

I keep going back to Flock ever now and then, but the lack of speed really gets to me.

I will give iCab another shot, although it has a nag screen. The rest have a long way to go before they get me to give them another shot.