As my friends know, I am a big Safari fan. Safari 3 is fine and 4 promises even faster performance.
I like that Safari keeps all of my web passwords in the keychain, and those keychains and bookmarks can be synced by Mobile Me.
However, the bookmark syncing sometimes fails, and Mobile Me costs $99 a year.
Firefox is massively popular and with version 3 now looks more like a Mac OS X application.
1passwd
However it still stores passwords in it’s own format.
Enter 1passwd. This $35 gem is something every Mac user should own.
1Passwd does the following things for you:
- Generates secure passwords
- Saves those passwords in your keychain (either your default or a specified keychain)
- Saves off identities (like who you are) for easy form filling (more accurate than saving forms)
- Saves off credit card info (also encrypted in the keychain)
- Remembers forms
Ok that is fine, but I have that already, you might thing. But check this out:
- 1Passwd works in Safari
- 1Passwd works in Firefox
- 1Passwd syncs and works with your iPhone (via their own Webkit browser)
Hold the presses here! I can use safari, generate a password, store the login form, then switch to Firefox and use the same forms and passwords there!
This one fantastic little application has allowed me to finally try out Firefox.
Initial Impressions
Firefox does seem very fast and stable. I’ve had one crash and the crash reporter popped up to let me give more data about what happened. I believe it was a 1passwd issue, but in 4 days of browsing that is not bad.
I kept trying to press the space bar to pop up menus in forms, but you have to use control-down arrow. Not a big deal.
Extensions
Firefox supports some awesome extensions, which don’t need to be hacked in like with Safari. Adblock is awesome, as is Firebug for developers.
Bookmarks
For bookmark syncing, there is a free site called Foxmarks. Foxmarks will sync your bookmarks between all of your firefox browsers. You do have to trust them with your bookmarks, but I never bookmark anything serious anyway. Install the Foxmarks extension, create an account, and off you go. The syncing is very fast, unlike Mobile Me syncing.
The Firefox 3 bookmark editor is much nicer than it was in previous versions. I think it is actually usable.
Also nice are the smart bookmarks, which track things such as your most visited sites, or recently bookmarked.
You can also add tags to Firefox bookmarks, then make smart bookmark folder or search on those tags. Why hasn’t Apple done this? This smacks of Spotlight searching.
Zooming
Hold down the control key and mouse wheel scroll, the web page will zoom in and out. I wonder if I can disable this, because I use control as my key for Ventrilo voice chat, and while chatting and scrolling pages, Firefox zooms. Oops.
Themes
Firefox has themes which allows you to choose how the browser controls look. I don’t find myself using this but obviously many people love it!
Summary
Regardless of which browser you use, check out 1passwd. It will help you generate much more secure passwords for every site you visit. They even have a service to back up your passwords, if you trust them.
Give Firefox + Foxmarks a try. You might like what you see.