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Firefox Vs. Safari: Small Features Make A Big Difference

Daring Fireball's John Gruber has a fling with Firefox, but comes home to Safari. He praises Firefox's extensions, memory management, auto-restore of closed windows, the way it handles history, and more. But he decides that he prefers Safari because of a laundry list of small features that seem big to him.

Daring Fireball:

After a few weeks in the arms of Firefox 3 betas, I've returned to Safari as my daily browser. Unsurprisingly, it's the interface that drove me back.

But I'm not talking about cosmetic issues -- or at least not only about cosmetic issues. The new default theme for Firefox theme looks pretty good, especially when you switch the toolbar icons to the small size. The Safari-style "GrApple" Firefox themes I linked to last month makes Firefox 3 look even better, albeit mostly by mimicking Safari.

But cosmetic appeal is just the surface. Steve Jobs, in a 2003 New York Times magazine interview, said:

"Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it's this veneer -- that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."

And that's just it. Firefox 3's shortcomings as a Mac app are behavioral, too.

My experience is the opposite of Gruber's: I've tried Safari several times, and keep coming back to Firefox. I wrote about my reasons for returning to Firefox from Safari here. It's a mirror image of Gruber's post; both of us cite a laundry list of tiny features that are important to us.

To cite just one example of something I find extremely useful in Firefox: As a blogger, I frequently quote other people's writing; Firefox lets me select text on a Web page, right-click on that text, select "View Selection Source," and then paste the source code for the selection into my text editor. A very small feature, but I use it every day and it's a big convenience for me.

In my review of Firefox 3's latest beta, I praised the way Firefox's location bar provides easy access to bookmarks and history -- a feature which, ironically, Gruber dislikes.

Small features make all the difference in why we connect with certain applications, and are downright repulsed by others. Earlier today, my colleague Alex Wolfe wrote about why he loves Microsoft Word. I'd rather chew off my own fingers than use Word for a prolonged period. I suspect Alex could come up with a list of a dozen minor features that are the major reasons why he loves Word -- and I could come up with a dozen minor features that are the major reasons why I prefer to do my writing in TextMate and Scrivener.

What applications do you love, and why?

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