Fred Cirera

A few years back, I was a heavy FireFox user. After Safari came out, I started using FireFox less and less with every new version of Safari.

I was using FireFox because it was more secure, had a better compatibility with web sites developed with Microsoft tools and for IE. Also as a developer I made a heavy usage of all the plugins to debug, inspect the DOM and profile my code.

But FireFox has a drawback, it is not well integrated on MacOS, all the buttons have a different look. The short cuts are Windows and not Mac. It uses a lot of CPU, is bloated, and leaky and crashes often and it is S.L.O.W.

For these reasons with every new version of Safari, I ended up using it more for my everyday work, and surfing. Lately the only time I needed FireFox was for debugging some pages I was developing. But now with the new version of Safari and the new version of Web Inspector Safari covers all my needs.

Web Inspector: Profiler

Web Inspector: Source & CSS browser

I am very sad for Mozilla, I really like that company, I like the spirit, I like that project. I really would like to use FireFox more. But this product is not at the cutting edge of the technology, as it used to be. Or at least for the things I care about. I think a lot of developers on Mac, like me have slowly switched from a heavy to a more sporadic usage of FireFox. I don’t have anything strong against FireFox, but all the advantages of using FireFox have slowly faded away and today I have realized that I don’t need to use this software anymore. It is not faster than Safari. It does not use less memory. It does not have super cool features that I really need. Safari now covers 100% for my needs. I don’t seen any reason for me to start FireFox anymore. Ok I will start it once in a while to see how things evolve…