I’ll start by saying, I love Firefox. I love Firefox’s community, the plugins, even their logo kicks ass. But lately I’ve been getting real fed up with it’s unexpected shutdowns. Is it just me or has Firefox been notoriously buggy the last 3 months? Everyday it crashes a minimum 2-3x. I find consistently on any javascript heavy page I get the beach ball and up sitting an waiting anywhere from 2-8 seconds. I’ve actually began to use Safari 3 for the first time ever, and I have to say I’m really starting to like this browser.

It’s extremely snappy, especially when loading pages with large amounts of javascript. If you visit Meebo, Gmail, or use things like phpMyAdmin frequently, you’ll easily notice a speed increase. If you use the find on page function in browsers you’ll probably be familiar with typing in a search term, hitting enter, and watching your browser abruptly bounce to the word. I’ve always found this just to bounce about too fast, and sometime I spend my priceless seconds searching for the highlighted term that I know it found. Well Safari adds a beautiful UI enhancement to the search, check out the screen grab below when I searched for iPod.

They fade in a translucent screen, highlight the first instance of the search term, and quickly animate it bouncing off the page. An instant find.

And my most favorite feature about Apple’s new browser is it’s refresh rate while scrolling. What do I mean? I encourage you to open up Firefox, goto a fairly busy page, and click and drag the scrollbar up and down. Then go and do the same in Safari 3. Repeat the same test with Scriptaculous‘ home page which uses pure javascript based animations. You’ll be quite amazed at how much smoother and faster Safari really is. In comparison, Firefox makes you feel like your on a G4 cube with half the required RAM.

I’d honestly say if it wasn’t for Firefox’s Web developer and Firebug add-ons I’d be making the switch to leaner, faster browser. Hopefully Safari jumps in on the platform band wagon soon, until then I’ll be using Firefox only when doing web development.