I currently have four or five web browsers installed on my two Macs, and am still deciding exactly which one I like the best.

I used to be a staunch Safari fan – nothing could beat it, even though I knew that it lacked some features.

However, I went through a phase where Safari would quit for no obvious reason, and I ended up not being able to trust it. Believe me, when a browser crashes and loses ten to twenty open tabs, and your browsing history is incomplete (because it crashed) it takes the shine off.

I’d love to use Safari more, and with the impending iPhone, there are rumours that Safari will become a lot more important in the global scheme of Internet browsers – or at least, developers will need to ensure that their pages display and work correctly using it.

I had moved over to Firefox but had the same crashing problem. However, version 2 of FF seems a lot more stable – in fact I don’t think it’s crashed once since I’ve started using it, on either my Intel- or PowerPC-based Macs.

Camino does a decent job but its lack of built-in spell checking in forms really doesn’t cut it for me.

Opera was OK, and I liked some of its features, but I rarely fire it up now.

Firefox seems to be my favourite at present, and there’s a fairly good chance that what I’m seeing on screen is similar to what my PC-owning friends will see. I also like the fact that it remembers which tabs you’ve recently closed, and can start up an old Firefox session if you quit the program and then relaunch it. It also handles rich text forms far better than any of the other browsers – you may as well forget Safari handling them though hopefully a future release will address that.

It’s still not quite got the Mac GUI effect going on – the buttons are a bit XP-like – but at the end of the day I’m more concerned about getting my work done effectively. It’s not ugly – just not quite ‘Mac’.

And it’s not Microsoft, which can’t be a bad thing.