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Tab is easier to learn from, but using tab and staff together is what I do. I usually use my little knowledge about real music and apply it to tab, so I can understand what I'm doing. Learning staff music has been the most beneficial thing I've ever done as far as playing guitar goes.

Tabs are good if you hear the song and, not only learn the riff, but also put the tempo together as you listen to, and learn, the song. It's much easier to learn tablature, as well, making it much easier to learn the song itself, but much more difficult to learn the tempo(Unless you listen to the song enough to know the tempo right off the back, then you're perfectly fine. That's what I do)

Staff is great if you know how to read it. I for one can barely read it. I can tell you what a C, D, E and F are by looking at it with a moment or two dedicated to staring at it to figure it out, but staff is great if you hear the song once or twice, or have never heard the song at all before. Perhaps you heard part of the song that you like? It's good because the tempo is given to you along with the notes, making it great for learning the song without having to listen to the song itself like you would for tabliture. But the drawback is, of course, having to learn to read the music...

Of course both have their drawbacks and both have already been mentioned: Tablature doesn't given you the tempos and speeds while Staff requires you to read the music. Also, Staff won't tell you what octave to play in, meaning that if you're supposed to play a 'C' note on the 'A' string, you could be end up hitting it on the wrong octave: Using the 3rd fret instead of the 15th the song requires. Then you'll end up having to re-fret the whole song in accordance to proper octave usage, etc. Which in itself isn't a big deal, but very inconveniant...

That's just my take on it. Both have their advantages and drawbacks, and of course the Staff compensates for the octave flaw by having extra lines go all the way up to the roof, which becomes ridiculous after going up two or three octaves. Obviously, I for one would prefer the tablature. If you use tablature, what I like to do(And actually read in a magazine interviewing Herman Li, which is where I got the idea to start doing this) is use the tablature to a song and throw in something a little extra; improvising my own things into the already-existing song. Because Herman Li was right: Anybody can read and play music, but if you want to truly improve and make your own thing then you've gotta' throw in as much stuff as you can. If you want to learn the song itself then go for it, but doing that for too long won't do you much good.

I'm going way off topic at this point, but learn your scales and such and learn 'perfect pitch' and you won't even need to use either tabs or staff music to learn the songs. Scales are the best things you can learn, as far as I'm concerned, but that's probably not much coming from someone who hasn't played in 3 months(bootcamp ._.; Go Navy) and only knows a few scales himself. But once I started learning those scales, making up my own things and improvising became so much easier it was ridiculous, haha....

Tab is okay, I guess but if you want the more formal approach the other one's kinda needed.

i say tabs because they are more widespread

i think the staff is too hard for me.

They both work alright. But it's best when you use them together. Staff helps with Tempo and Tab helps with which strings to hit. I use them both and I've learned and written songs that way.