I have not been happy with my browser situation in a long time. For a while, OmniWeb was my browser of choice, until its legendary quirkiness in rendering many CSS2 pages finally caused me to give it the boot.
I used Chimera/Camino for a while. Eventually, for reasons I can no longer remember, I gave it up as well. I moved to Mozilla 1.3, then 1.4, and finally 1.5. I kept Safari in my Dock, for certain special tasks - browsing the Apple developer docs, for instance, and for previewing changes to the websites I might be working on.
I was always irritated that Mozilla could not match Safari's speed and low memory footprint. I was unwilling to migrate to Safari, however, for several reasons, the most prominent of which was Safari's lack of an "Ask me" option for cookies.
In my efforts to cure myself of the browser blues, I tried Mozilla Firebird. I started with 0.6. My first impression was: what a piece of crap. The (in)famous XML bug in 0.7 reinforced that opinion. I really didn't think that the bug would get fixed with any sort of alacrity, considering that the OS X Firebird "nightlies" were more like "monthlies."
To my surprise, Version Tracker reported to me that Firebird 0.7.1 was available and had the fix. I downloaded, and haven't been happier in a long time. If you haven't tried Firebird, you should. After 2 days, i've been completely satisfied with it as my default browser. It is both faster and more lightweight than the Mozilla Suite, and with the help of a few plug-ins and some time copying over my MIME settings, it has scratched all of my web browsing itches thus far.
Posted by brent at 22:15