So Safari renders faster. Ho hum. Safari isn't anywhere near as extensible as Firefox and is therefore less productive IMHO. It's a good default browser though.

Safari doesn't need to be as "extensible" as Firefox. It has much more functionailty built-in thanks to its status as a full-fledged native Cocoa application.

Mac users wanted speed for years. Now they have it.

You don't speak for me or anybody else I know. Safari isn't even close to having the same features I need (Adblock, Flashblock, Canadian English Dictionary, Japanese Dictionary, Rikaichan; all for free I might add). In fact, it's positively a liability in the large company I work for.

I'll reiterate, it's a good default browser. When you need heavy lifting Firefox is a good choice. As for render speed, well, I can wait the extra second or two (at most).

rpaege: There are add-ons for Safari, too, there's just no centralized location for them or standard interface for installing them like with Firefox. SafariBlock and SafariStand have Adblock and Flashblock covered (and then some), which is the most important thing for me. Of course the selection is nowhere near as wide as with Firefox, but it's not like it's completely closed up. As a developer I find it easier to make Safari add-ons, to be honest.

Personally, I don't use either as my primary browser anymore. I use iCab, which is WebKit-based like Safari. iCab has probably the most robust built-in feature set of any browser (with the possible exception of OmniWeb, which I haven't tried in a while).

Firefox 3 is my secondary browser. It's good. Firefox 2 was good, too. But somehow I've never wanted to replace my WebKit-based browsers (previously Safari, now iCab). Since I moved from Safari to iCab, I use Firefox less and less.

I have a question: do the speed comparisons really just apply to Safari and Firefox, or all WebKit-based browsers and all Gecko-based browsers? I usually assume any browser with the same engine will have pretty much the same performance. But maybe Apple's doing something special with Safari. I don't really know.