For a few weeks I’ve been having strange issues with browsers on my Mac. Firefox couldn’t render Arial properly, Flock had issues rendering fonts in search results, Opera was down right unusable and Camino had issues with Gmail fonts. Safari was just fine however.

Opera Browser Issues

I tried to Google the answer but got nothing. I thought it had to do with Snow Leopard, but it seemed I was the only one. I was pretty sure it had to do with fonts so I started digging.

June sure is shaping up to be a good month to be a Mac web geek! Every few days there is a new browser being released and they are all the fastest browser on the net.

Apple just introduced Safari 4. It has ‘remarkable’ new features as is the world’s fastest web browser according to Apple.

Firefox 3.5 will be here soon, and it’s shaping up to be by far the fastest Firefox yet: more than twice as fast as Firefox 3 and 10 times as fast as Firefox 2. That’s some serious speed.

Have you checked out Dromaeo.com?  It’s a Mozilla owned site that runs a set of JavaScripts and test out how fast your browser is.  I tried it on my iMac, 1.83 Intel Core Duo with 1.5 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM, and found Firefox 3 beta 5 to be the fastest browser.  Oddly enough, Firefox 2 was the slowest, even behind SeaMonkey!

Granted, this is no professional test.  Firefox 2 has the  most extensions on my computer and that could cause slowness.  There are always a lot of factors to take into consideration, but this is what my tests show.

The number of different applications that use Gecko are ever increasing. What’s Gecko? It’s the rendering engine that powers such programs as Firefox, Thunderbird and many more.

I guess it all starts with Netscape back in 1998 and possibly even before that when Netscape decided to make a technology to power their browser. It’s come a long way and here are a few applications taking advantage of this open source technology.

1. Firefox* – The most popular and most wildly used Gecko application. It’s the little web browser that’s trying to change the world. With hundreds of extensions and themes, customizing it to fit your needs is one thing that makes it so popular.

The other day Hawk Wings tipped us off about a new mail application that is coming to the Mac. It’s called Correo and it’s sound like it has a lot of potential.

Think of it like Camino, the cousin of Firefox that’s Gecko powered, but Mac pretty. Well Correo is the same thing. Gecko powered like Thunderbird, but Mac pretty.

Correo Mail Application Screen Shot Hosted on Zooomr

The current version is 0.1 and it’s off to a great start. It already includes POP & IMAP support, multiple accounts, two or three pained layouts, MacOSX spell check, excellent icons and really, all the basics.