Let’s face it. It’s sleek. It’s one of the fastest browsers out there for OS X. It syncs with my .Mac account, so I have a seamless browsing experience on all of my Macs. But, alas, I have a love/hate relationship with OS X Safari. I come back to it every once in a while for a few weeks, have a great time, and then things start turning sour. And by sour, I mean bitter, nasty, and hair-pullingly difficult.

When I get to these moments I invariably go back to Firefox. Firefox and Safari are different in as many ways as they are the same…

Here’s the really basic lowdown: While Safari is faster, Firefox is multi-threaded, so you can actually do other stuff with it while a page is loading (Safari can’t).

Firefox also doesn’t spontaneously “forget” the login information I have stored in the browser for the various sites that I use on a daily basis the way Safari does. It doesn’t seem to randomly delete stored cookies the way Safari does. It doesn’t look as nice as Safari does, though, and I’m surprising myself by saying that that actually matters.

I mentioned Safari’s inability to do ANYTHING else while loading a page. This is frustrating. It’s not at all uncommon when debugging a server issue to have pages loading at idle for a minute or more, thus holding your browser hostage during the process. It seems that Safari’s performance comes at the expense of the ability to perform multiple simultaneous operations. This won’t change for the near-term I don’t suspect.

I’ve never seen Safari’s “forgetfulness” issue discussed anywhere online, despite months of googling. Yet at geek parties and among friends it’s constantly discussed. I can’t believe that people just put up with it. Therefore I am convinced that it’s not me. It’s you, Safari.

Sayonara.