John Gruber with a great comparison of Firefox 3 and Safari 3 beta browsers for the Mac. His preference is for Safari 3, though he notes that Firefox has some important advantages.

I've been using these two browsers (Firefox 3 b5) for a few weeks now as well. I prefer Firefox 3, for a few reasons. As Gruber notes, Safari is a memory hog, and given the number of applications I have open at once, Firefox's efficient memory usage makes a difference. I hate that Safari doesn't offer that option to open up with the tabs from your last session. Such a simple fix, I have no idea why they haven't added that after so many generations now.

And, of course, there's Firebug. Indispensable, and even better now that version 1.2 is in alpha. The Web Dev Toolbar is another useful plugin, and I use FoxiPod just about every day.

But Gruber is also right in that both are a step up from the previous generation: faster, more powerful and functional.

UPDATE: According to ZDNet, Firefox 3.0 b5 holds a slight speed edge on Safari 3.1, though both are faster than their previous versions, Firefox 2.0.0.12 and Safari 3.0.4.

browsers, Mac, review, web