For reasons I can't put my finger on it makes pages look somehow prettier than other browsers... I think it has nicer font rendering and layout, and the way it draws widgets... but there's no reason to use it over Firefox. edit -- if you look at photographs a lot it's better since it supports all that colour balancing stuff
It's definitely not shit. From a technical POV its rendering engine is slightly ahead of Firefox, both in terms of speed and standards-compliance/support (and of course miles ahead of IE)... just not enough to out-weigh the lack of extensions.
apple tricked me into downloading it with iTunes a while back <A BORDER="0" HREF="http://www.supercars.net/PitLane?displayFAQ=y"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="pitlane/emoticons/angry.gif"></A><A BORDER="0" HREF="http://www.supercars.net/PitLane?displayFAQ=y"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="pitlane/emoticons/angry.gif"></A> The only thing i've ever actually used it for is to check whether firefox was broken or whether it was the website itself.
It's what I use on my mac simply because I like it enough that I can't be bothered downloading firefox. If I had a PC I'd choose firefox over it though, but there's really nothing wrong with it.
Lol I'm on Safari now... Sc. net looks really pretty now <A BORDER="0" HREF="http://www.supercars.net/PitLane?displayFAQ=y"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="pitlane/emoticons/grin.gif"></A> But you're right, feuerfuchs is faster.
Safari used to have a really slow scripting engine; which I think is still in the current shipping version. But if you download one of the nightly builds, which has the new engine which will be in the Safari 4 release, it's just as fast as the latest Firefox dev builds (will ship with 3.1), and they're both faster than Chrome which is the current fastest shipping browser. I don't know why I know all this <A BORDER="0" HREF="http://www.supercars.net/PitLane?displayFAQ=y"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="pitlane/emoticons/confused.gif"></A> edit -- the Safari dev' builds are also the most standards-compliant along with the current Opera dev builds (both score 100% on Acid 3: http://acid3.acidtests.org/ ). The current Firefox 3.1 beta 2 (which I'm using now) only scores 93/100. edit2 -- the best any IE testing version - 8.0 beta 2 - does is 21/100 <A BORDER="0" HREF="http://www.supercars.net/PitLane?displayFAQ=y"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="pitlane/emoticons/tongue.gif"></A> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid3 ...7.0 chokes out at 14/100 haha
At least IE8 finally passes the Acid2 test... Safari was the first browser to back in 2005: http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/acid/
If you use any sort of apple peripheral like a touch or an iPhone Safari is nice because all of your bookmarks and shit carry over really well. Since I don't really use any extensions in firefox (other than the IE rendering one), I've started using safari and kinda dig it.