Going on a Safari

I've been a very satisfied Firefox user for about three and a half years (I started using it when it was called Firebird).  Before that I typically used Mozilla because I found IE's lack of tabbed browsing to be intolerable.

However I've tentatively switched to Safari full time recently.  Specifically I'm using the new Safari 3.0 beta.  Why would I do such a thing after being so happy with the more widely used and open source Firefox?

Well the main reason is that I've been using my MacBook Pro for work and running Windows Server 2003 under Parallels.  I get a lot of second looks carrying a Mac at Microsoft (I'm on a vendor contract there).  Safari seems to be less hungry for CPU and memory, which are precious when running two OSs.  Plus, it is noticeably faster when loading most web pages.

My previous attempts to use Safari ended quickly because I missed Firefox's type-ahead find and Google search auto-completion, but Safari 3.0 adds find functionality that is even better (it dims the page and highlights the search text in orange as you type) and the Inquisitor plugin gets me the search-box completion.  Plus Safari's bookmarks sync with my iPhone and .Mac account and passwords are stored in Keychain (one of the Mac's best apps that most people don't know about).  I still miss Firefox's session restore and a few of the plugins, but those don't affect me on a daily basis.

It seems that I'm constantly becoming more and more dependent on Apple's software (most recently iWeb and .Mac), which gives me a little pause, but they just meet my needs so well.