As part of my never-ending quest to exercise more control over my online life I switched from Safari to Firefox for daily browsing– Mac, iPhone, iPad. Actually, I switched to Firefox on the Mac a month or so ago, but only made the jump to Firefox on iOS last week with the latest update. Privacy and security. Well, more privacy than security, but I lump them together. For macOS High Sierra offers built-in privacy tools, and similar tools now show up in for iOS. Back to the why. For the Mac, the change to Firefox was based upon a sweet spot combo of privacy and speed.

The best browser for your Mac is the one that comes with your Mac. Safari is faster and more energy efficient than other browsers. Handy tools help you save, find, and share your favorite sites.

Good gawd, Firefox on the Mac is fast– visibly faster on most websites, including mine, than Safari, and definitely faster than Google Chrome or Opera (which I use from time to time, thanks to the built-in VPN– virtual private network. Firefox developer Mozilla can see the future is about privacy and both Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari just don’t do enough. Google’s business model is advertising and tracking. Apple makes a few billion dollars in profits each year by putting Google’s search engine as default, so I consider the Mac maker somewhat complicit in all the tracking and privacy issues these days. What version of apple hardware test for mac pro 2010. Not only is Firefox on Mac very fast, it manages memory better, uses less RAM, and can open dozens of websites in tabs without a hiccup. I’m old school and open many tabs and I hate it that Safari can’t handle the load.

Firefox has a Private Browsing mode that forgets your browsing history. It uses an advanced version of the tracking protection in Safari to advertisers from following you across different websites.

And, of course, Firefox has a large library of extensions and add-ons. For the iPhone and iPad I use two Firefox browsers. Firefox for iOS– the newest version has similar built-in privacy functions to the Mac version.

And, which is a stripped down, ultra simple, very fast browser that features always-on privacy features, including ad blocking. The best part is a single Erase button near the top which erases the browsing history with a single tap. Now, between Safari on Mac and iOS vs. Chrome on Mac or iOS, I would go with Safari because Apple’s business model varies from Google’s tracking model. What bothers me about Safari is Apple’s continued use of Google as the default search engine. Yes, we can easily change the default to Bing or DuckDuckGo or something else– but what else is there?

Apple needs to get out of bed with Google. That’s why I switched from Safari to Firefox.

Since the question arising on Firefox is open, I was wondering what differences anyone has seen between it, and Safari. I have been using Safari with but a few problems for some time. Is there an opinion as to which is better, it at all? I am using it with OS 10.3.6 on two G4's, a Titanium laptop, and a 1.25 dual processor, both with plenty of RAM. Free wysiwyg editors for windows. There is, however, one specific question. Some sites I can access fully with the laptop, but not with the desktop, even though they are virtually the same hardware & software. I own a PowerMac G5 Single 1.8 Ghz machine.

I absolutely love Safari, after having used IE on PC's for over 15 years. I have a glitch however when I log on to my Bank and do my online banking. The Bank site will boot me off after attempting to say, transfer funds, or bill payer, or whatever. I then have to log back on and complete the transaction, or start again. That usually happens once when I logon in any particular timeframe of a few minutes. Since downloading Firefox and using it the last couple days, It has loaded pages faster, without any glitches at all, including the bank site. I have two points to address: First - I use Camino (from the makers of Firefox - a browser made just for Macintosh) and bookmarks can easily be imported in to Camino by selecting File/Import Bookmarks.

You'll have the option of importing Safari, Netscape, Internet Explorer or Other Browser Bookmarks. Firefox is not quite as flexible - you'll have to choose File/Import. You'll be presented with a window to 'Import Preferences, Bookmarks, History, Passwords and other data from:' and the choice to import from Netscape 6,7 or Mozilla 1.x or Opera. Secondly, I also had a banking issue while using Safari. While doing my bill pay, the dollar amounts whould show incorrectly and the dates were wildly incorrect (like 1902!;-) ) When I called the bank to report the problem, they were immediatley aware of it and said they had worked at length to correct it, but were unable. So there seems to be some weird banking security thing going on with Safari - hopefully Apple will fix it to get Safari up and running because it really is a great browser. I was a fan of the Safari browser.