In this corner, after being beaten successively due to bloat and crashes but coming back swinging with a fully complete OS X native interface is Firefox 3 beta.
And in this corner, the successive champion for the past two rounds, the Webkit nightly build. And now apparently faster than ever, this perrenial favorite isn’t about to go down lightly.
The past two times I’ve tested both of these have been characterized by crashes on both sides due to their beta/nightly status and frequent incompatibilities with add-ons. But the impressive speed improvements and gloss have kept them well ahead of their respective stable brethren in my view.
Preliminary results seem to indicate that things are strangely neck-and-neck. Both render Gmail seemingly equally, including the odd fact that both include the strange bug where keyboard shortcuts are not immediately accepted upon page load; the user needs to click somewhere on the page first before either browser allows Gmail to accept keyboard shortcuts. And similarly, both render the older UI perfectly (with the exception that on Gmail’s end, Webkit is not given the option to have Gmail chat). Firefox seems to be a bit softer on the text rendering in Gmail, but text on Digg seems to render without any visible difference.
Firefox’s new address bar, with its new-fangled automagical search, seems to impressive on first glance. More testing is needed. Firefox however, seems to be stubbornly refusing to implement the standard OS X tab switching keyboard shortcut (cmd-shift-[ or cmd-shift-]) and is intent on forging forward with its own standard. I still see no reason why both cannot exist on the OS X version of Firefox. As for the rest of the UI, it is a definite improvement toward making the browser seem more integrated with the rest of the OS, instead of having it stick out like a sore thumb. That said, with Webkit’s facelift-by-default provided by Leopard, I would argue that Firefox still has catching up to do, especially when it comes to clutter. And I haven’t even installed any add-ons to my version of Firefox yet; I can only imagine how cluttered it would be when my normal suite of add-ons are piled onto the UI.
As for a completely unscientific guess at resource usage, a quick glance at my terminal and top suggests that despite the slimming of Firefox 3’s waistline, it’s still not enough to change the fact that running one window with 3 tabs (Digg.com, Massively.com and Gmail) is enough to push firefox-bin into the 15-22% range of CPU usage at idle. Compared to two windows and 6 tabs spread evenly across both windows (including the same tabs as in Firefox), and Safari (the process name for the Webkit nightly) hits 3-20%. So while it seems Webkit seems to fluctuate much more wildly than Firefox, Firefox is consistently higher. But perhaps consistency is better. Again, this is a completely unscientific poll.
So far? The verdict is simply for more testing. Mmmm…shiny shiny web browsers.
