OS X Mountain Lion Bible

Using Other Browsers

Safari comes with OS X, but it's not the only browser available for your Mac. And it may not be the best one for you, either. Two other mainstream browsers worth considering are Mozilla Firefox (www.mozilla.com) and Google Chrome (www.google.com/chrome). You can have multiple browsers on your Mac, and you can run them at the same time, so it's not an either/or proposition. (A third browser option is Opera [www.opera.com], but it's never gained many adherents despite its long history.)

Why would you consider a different browser than Safari? These are the two biggest reasons:

• Security: Safari is one of the least secure popular browsers available. Firefox and Chrome are more secure, according to security experts, with better protection against phishing and other hacking attacks. Also, Firefox lets you set a password to enable autofill of sensitive data, such as your login information for banking and other sites (in the Security pane of Firefox's Preferences dialog, select Use a Master Password), so someone can't just fire up Firefox and connect to all your accounts for which you have enabled autofill. Safari can't do that, so anything that is set to autofill in Safari can be accessed by anyone who has access to your user account.

• User interface: Safari's handling of bookmarks can be awkward: You either need to group bookmarks in a folder accessible from the bookmarks bar, which requires more planning, or open the bookmarks window, which takes over your entire ...