When comparing Safari vs Firefox Developer Edition, the Slant community recommends Firefox Developer Edition for most people. In the question“What are the best browsers for web development?” Firefox Developer Edition is ranked 1st while Safari is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose Firefox Developer Edition is:
Is the only browser I know with features specifically oriented to aid web development out of the box.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Works elegantly in OSX
The rendering of the pages and the browser compatibility with OSX works smoothly, when compared to other browsers. Also you get very high battery life with Safari, when compared to Chrome.
Pro Extremely fast
Pro Sleek design
– No distraction stuff like favicons in tabs, all that borders, bevels and embosses in panels like in other browsers, no ugly shaped tabs.
– Neat adress bar.
– Good looking start “show all tabs” screen.
Pro iCloud syncing
Tabs, passwords, bookmarks and, history all sync across devices.
Pro Safari uses Webkit, a great open source web engine
Webkit is very light compared to Blink, renders web pages at an incredible speed, great CSS support and is also constantly evolving.
Pro Designed specifically for web development
Is the only browser I know with features specifically oriented to aid web development out of the box.
Pro Can be launched alongside Firefox (release version)
Some might find that useless, but that's very practical to dedicate a browser to development.
Pro Standard complaint
AFAIK, Firefox is the most HTML/CSS/JS standard complaint of all the browsers out there.
Pro Feature rich
This browser is the most feature richt browser for web development out of the box.
You can restrict the bandwidth in "Responsive Design Mode" to see how the page performs under unoptimal conditions.
It has predefined profiles for e.g. Ipad, Galaxy S9 and lots more.
Pro Ready for work right out-of-the-box
Pro Fast
It's Firefox. It's fast.
Pro Beta channel
As this branch of firefox uses a beta channel of firefox releases, you will see if future versions will contain breaking changes and give you time to react.
Cons
Con OSX only
Apple dropped Windows support after Safari 5.
Con Does NOT block Ads
Doesn't block ads, unlike browsers like Brave and Vivaldi.
Con Poor support for new web technologies
Safari usually takes its time when it comes to adopting new and useful web technologies meaning that the user gets an inferior experience compared to other modern browsers.
Con Proprietary
While Safari er is currently available gratis (without monetary charge) on Mac OS X, it is currently not libre (meaning that it does not allow users to view the source code used to create, to modify that code, or to redistribute modifications) and is therefore neither free nor open-source software.
Con Outdated Rendering engine
All other browsers and toolkits (Qt/GTK) have shifted to Googles Blink-fork of KHTML/Webkit so Apple is currently the only main contributor left.
Con Terrible support for open source formats like .VP9 or .ogg
Apple does not support open source formats. Instead, they use H.264 and H.265.
Con Even on OSX not the best Experience
Video controls are bad esp. on youtube. Only few browser extensions.
Con Heavy
Since it has a lot of tools to support debugging and web development, it is considerably heavier than the standard version of Firefox, definitely I don't recommend it for standard web browsing.
Con May be unstable
Since it is a release channel between beta and Nightly, it may be unstable.
Con Lack of support for source maps in blobs
Still a bit buggy support for CSS source maps coming from blobs. The team is working on it though, and the fixes will eventually land in the production code.
Con Not based on Chromium
If you don't want to make your website support non-Chromium browsers, this can be a problem.
Con This project is not yet available for Android
The developer edition is not available for mobile devices, though the beta and nightly channels are available, and can be used for testing future versions of Firefox.
Con Has to be installed with a Mozilla account
