No-one can say Mac OS X users endure a lack of choice when it comes to web browsers. In fact, there are a great many; but what's most striking when comparing them is the quality of design and features they all offer. None of the browsers we tested for this round-up could be criticised for much; all are excellent applications. It's just a matter of finding the one that suits you best. The web is a mature platform now, and with applications increasingly moving from the desktop to the internet (or occupying both spaces at once), the strength and reliability of your browser is becoming ever more important. As more of your work and files gets transferred to the network, you need a browser with sufficient clout to manage rich web applications that try, as far as possible, to emulate the desktop apps that influenced them. It's important that your browser doesn't crash under the strain. The best all-round performer here is Firefox, but in a sense all of them are winners. None of these browsers is a "bad" choice; they're just different. We have 10 years of dedication and hard work by many browser developers to thank for that. Safari 3 RATING: Five mice PRICE: Free CONTACT: apple.com/safari NEEDS: Mac OS X 10.4.9 PROS: Cross-platform + Excellent in-page find CONS: None Announced by Steve Jobs at this year's WWDC event, Safari 3's headline feature was cross-platform compatibility with Windows. But the real gems were hidden behind the headlines. Some of the new features are lovely, the search-in-page function particularly so. It doesn't just highlight the search terms with big friendly orange blobs of colour, it also dims the rest of the page to make them stand out. No other browser gets the find function right like this. Another useful new idea is the ability to drag web form text areas to a more reasonable size. Since web applications make use of these form fields rather a lot, this turns out to be incredibly handy. Safari will remember the tabs you had open last time, and the History menu lets you re-open them all quickly. Bonjour support means that Safari 3 finds servers and other networked devices on your local network, neatly including them in the bookmarks menu. Performance is improved, and the bugginess of early Safari 3 beta releases has disappeared. It's fast enough, but not the zippiest browser of the group. Safari has matured nicely, and held its own against older, better-established rivals. It's flexible too, as shown by recent appearances on iPhones and iPods. Caption: Safari 3 offers an excellent basic feature set, but wait for the full release Firefox 2 RATING: Five mice PRICE: Free CONTACT: www.getfirefox.com NEEDS: Mac OS X 10.2 PROS: Extendable + Reliable + Simple CONS: None If any browser could be said to be suited to everyone, Firefox would be it. Now a veteran application, what it lacks in visual appeal is more than made up for by the wealth of possibilities it offers. The features list is long. A wonderful recent addition is the Recently Closed Tabs list, found inside the History menu. Any tab closed in error can be swiftly recovered (or a collection of them opened in new tabs). Security is a high priority, with decent anti-phishing measures and some protection from spyware. But it's the huge variety of extras, in the form of extensions, which makes Firefox uniquely adaptable to a users' demands. Web developers can turn it into a semi-automated machine for validating and checking their code; professional browsers can churn through dozens of tabs incredibly fast; and best of all, even the least technically-minded user like your mum or your gran can sit down in front of it and just go. It's so simple to use by default, and so familiar to refugees from Internet Explorer, that there's no learning curve at all. It's this flexibility that earns Firefox top prize. It can turn its hand to anything and can be depended on to do it well. Caption: Firefox suits newbies and professionals alike OmniWeb 5 RATING: Four mice PRICE: $14.95 (about £7) CONTACT: www.omnigroup.com NEEDS: Mac OS X 10.4.8 PROS: Superb quality + Excellent source editor + Workspaces CONS: Price OmniWeb has a long history with Mac OS X, and that history counts for something: i is a mature, elegant product that makes browsing the web a pleasure. In use, OmniWeb is gorgeous. The visual tabs are attractive (although can get unwieldy when more than a handful are open), the source editor better than any other browser's, and the workspace settings very useful for separating out certain web tasks. The bookmarks manager is better than most, offering clear slices through your bookmark collection - you can quickly jump to the most visited pages, bookmarks shared over the network from colleagues, even local servers. Per-site preferences are found in other browsers these days, but OmniWeb makes it easier to handle them with a slide-in control panel. Despite all its excellent features and emphasis on quality of product (something it shares with everything from the Omni stable), OmniWeb still suffers a second, non-software-related, problem: it costs money. No-one would suggest that Omni Group doesn't deserve to earn money from such a good product, but the fact is that equally good competitors are now widely available for free. The price asked for OmniWeb is not much, but anything above zero will inevitably drive customers elsewhere. Caption: OmniWeb's source code editor is great for web developers Opera 9 RATING: Four mice PRICE: Free CONTACT: www.operasoftware.com NEEDS: Mac OS X 10.3 PROS: Fast + Packed with features + Tiger compatible CONS: Suffers feature creep The Opera team are rightfully proud of their browser, which has always been innovative and a source of new ideas for the rest of the pack. Speed has been addressed with the version 9 releases, which are now impressively fast. Which is good, because Opera's always been about speed. That's why it's so good at blocking out whatever you don't want to see: images, CSS, adverts, pop-ups, you name it: Opera can strip it out of sight for you. Mac users can be forgiven for feeling a little lost amid the very alien (and Windows-like) UI, but the browser's features should make up for that. There's so much wonderful stuff packed in: full screen mode, "speed dial" for creating your own mini portal of favourite sites, per-side preferences, the built-in zoom controls. All of it free. There's so many features, in fact, that you could get lost among them. Is Opera bloatware? Perhaps; you might argue that there's really no need for built-in email and chat clients, or the bewildering complexity of the preferences panel. But you don't have to use all these extras, and Opera makes a fine and functional browser with all of them switched off or ignored. Caption: Opera has everything covered, including preview thumbnails on tabs Camino 1.5 RATING: Five mice PRICE: Free CONTACT: www.caminobrowser.org NEEDS: Mac OS X 10.3 PROS: Reliable + Fast + Very high quality CONS: Fewer features than competitors Poor little Camino; such a great browser, but never able to pull in the users like its cousin Firefox. Because it concentrates on the basics and spurns development of unnecessary extras, Camino has always been a high quality product. Version 1.5 was about catching up with the competition, adding automatic session restore and detection of RSS feeds. It also does a superb job of blocking advertising; with a simple tick in the preferences pane, all adverts (Flash or otherwise) disappear. Irrespective of your views on the ethics behind ad blocking, you'll have trouble finding another browser that does a better job of it. Single Window Mode also deals effectively with pop-ups and cheeky sites that insist on opening additional windows. Unlike most competitors, Camino is maintained by a very small team of enthusiasts, headed by Google's Mike Pinkerton, who works on the browser's development in the 20 per cent of his work time permitted for personal projects. As such, Camino is one of Google's unsung success stories. If you're after bells and whistles, Camino is not for you. But if you want a finely honed web browsing tool that you can depend on for day-to-day use, it's an excellent choice, lack of popular support notwithstanding. Caption: Camino is small, lightweight, and concentrates on doing the basics well