Opera has recently become free. I'm not sure what its "marketshare" is, but it's tiny. Although their homepage (opera.com) is popular enough that's it's the first result for a googling of "opera."
Because of its relative obscurity, pages render a bit oddly in Opera, or sometimes not at all. Extentions aren't too ubiquitous, there are skins - a lot of extra features can be added by going into the about:config files and into system files on your computer. If that scares you, you might want to avoid this browser (here's an example of
Opera equivalents of FF extentions). Then again, if that scares you now, you might end up learning something by using this browser.
On the pro side, there is a very good mail program integrated into the browser, so if you were using it for general browsing, you can have all of your email accounts in a frame. Or, I suppose you could use the whole browser as a mail program.
Keyboard shotcuts are different in Opera - for example, the "new tab" shortcut in Safari and FF is the "bookmark" shortcut in Opera. That's obviously changeable, but involves some digging around in preferences. The preferences menu in Opera is so extensive, in fact, that there's also a "quick preferences" option.
One of the preference panes in Opera.
Personally, I use a proxy to read academic journals, and I have that proxy installed on Opera, I don't use it for general browsing.
Safari came preinstalled on my powerbook, and is the browser I use most often. Now that you know that, there are some problems with it. Page rendering is highly unreliable - flash frequently disappears when I scroll. All of those neat formatting tools in GMail don't show up.
GMail compose window in Safari (top) vs. Firefox (bottom) (Opera's compose is the same as Safari's)Lots, lots, nearly all of web 2.0 (sidenote: could someone think of a better name for that please?) applications like
writely and
kiko don't work at all. Part of this is due to Safari's smaller market share, and mac people get used to this kind of thing - we can't choose between 10,000 different versions of the same program, but generally the few that are mac-compatible are very good (
VLC Player,
MacAmp....etc - if you're interested in reading a bit more about mac software check out this neat little
list or
this one).
It loads itself fastest of the three browsers - I never think "Oh dammit, I just clicked on safari by accident and now I have to wait forever," which happens with FF sometimes. The integration with the rest of your mac is fantastic - any RSS feeds that you bookmark in Safari can be displayed as a screensaver, which is just neat.
It's customizable like FF, with a lot of the
safari extentions emulating those previously written for mozilla.
And, the Breakdown:
Tabbed browsing: all
Reliable Page rendering: 1.FF 2.Safari 3.Opera
Software reliability 1. Safari 2. Opera & FF (tie)
Speed: 1. Safari 2.FF 3.Opera
OpenSource: Firefox only
Price: all free
Remember last session: Opera Only
Customization (ease of): 1. Firefox 2. Safari 3.Opera
User-Friendliness: 1. Firefox 2. Safari 3.Opera
And, one simple pro and con for each:
Firefox:
pro: easy to use and customize
con: memory eater, runs slowly
Safari:
pro: fast, clean
con: flash animation renders poorly
Opera:
pro: session memory
con: poor page rendering