I was never a huge fan of the Firefox browser for Mac. I wanted to be – it’s open-source, has add-ons, great tabbed browsing, etc. – but it simply wasn’t suited for the Mac. It didn’t look like the other Mac apps, it was a bit heavier than Safari, etc.
Then they released Firefox 3.0, and that all changed. Now it’s prettier than Safari, it’s fast, and I get all the advantages of Firefox’s add-ons, etc. Now I use it exclusively.
So how does this relate to the iPhone? Well, here’s another reason to use it over Safari: Safari bookmark syncing.
MobileMe keeps your desktop Safari bookmarks synced to your iPhone. Great, right? Not if you use it as a daily browser, it’s not. Your bookmarks can get really bloated really fast with a daily browser, and that makes finding the bookmark you want on your iPhone pretty damned difficult. Endless flicking, selecting folders, sub-folders, etc. can get to be a chore when all you really need on your iPhone is a small set of commonly-used bookmarks.
So I use my desktop Safari as basically a bookmark manager for my iPhone. I use Firefox regularly, and open Safari just to sort bookmarks or browse for pages I know I’m going to want later on my iPhone. This lets me keep a small, dedicated bookmark folder synced between my iPhone and Safari – a manageable list of favorites that I can actually navigate on the 3.5″ iPhone screen.
Jeremy Pippin is a writer and web consultant living in the New York metropolitan area.