Safari blowhard switches to Firefox 3, film at 11

After ages of preferring Safari I think I’ve just convinced myself to switch to Firefox 3. I’ve added a few extensions to make it work pretty nicely the way I like, and fill in some features it’s missing (and some that Safari itself doesn’t have):

• FoxMarks, so I can sync my bookmarks on all machines where I use Firefox 3, optionally to my own server and not some untrusted organization “in the cloud”
• Fast Video Downloader, for better, more efficient thievery of embedded flash videos

and most importantly:

• 1Password, which lets me synchronize my web passwords across all browsers, the OS X keychain and my iPhone. I’m probably going to write something separate up on this app. Check it out.

I liked Safari because it was a faster and more standards compliant browser, and it just felt more correct to use the native rendering engine included with the OS. However… While Firefox 2 was slow to render pages, consumed a ton of RAM after a while and generally looked like a poor mockup of a Mac application, as of Firefox 3, the browser is fast. Damn fast. Its memory usage doesn’t spin out of control anymore like Firefox 2 used to (a fact that drew me to trying it again as I read about the memory improvements on various development blogs). And, Mozilla have done a good job of matching the MacOS X look and feel this time around. Firefox 3 also replaced the regular old address bar with the Awesome Bar, a gimmicky name that encompasses some handy features like bookmark and history search as you type. Begin typing a familiar word and it will show you a list of relevant history items and bookmarks that match. Contextual icons appear to the right of the bar that let you subscribe to RSS feeds, bookmark the page, mark it as a favorite, etc. Subtle but feature-rich. A pretty good overview of the Awesome Bar can be found here. As for the feature list provided by extensions above, Safari does let you download Flash video, but you have to dig through the activity window and double fish for the filename. You can also sync your bookmarks with multiple Macs, but only if you purchase a MobileMe subscription. And that’s just 3 Firefox extensions. There are tons. So, I’m thinking Firefox 3 is pretty cool so far.