For the very first days I used my Mac I didn’t like Safari, since some nice features in Firefox I got used to were missing. E.g. the great feature to start searches in Google by typing “g” followed by the search string in the address bar or the blocking of advertisements by the AdBlock Plugin. I felt a little like in IE6 times 
But: Safari is much faster compared to Firefox and is more nicely integrated to the Mac. Finally I decided “speed defeats functionality” and I started to use Safari.
The good news is: you can pimp Safari by plugins, too.From my point of view, you only need three plugins to get a better Safari:
- The general purpose plugin Glims that adds stuff like the Google search thingy described above, fullscreen mode, advanced navigation, and much more to Safari.
- The Safari AdBlock Plugin. Nomen est omen.
- And finally (if you like browsing pages like Flickr, Deviantart, etc for good photos) Cooliris. Cooliris is some kind of display mechanism for gallery content without the webpage around the photos. It extracts the pictures from the site and displays them on a clean black, somehow coverflow-like surface. Browsing pictures like this is more fun than clicking on thousand buttons on the webpages…