Back to Safari

(No, I haven’t tried Safari 3.0.)

At work yesterday we were talking about how slow Firefox has become. You’re chugging around, opening a few tabs and then, after a few hours, you notice that everything takes like a second to respond. Has anyone else noticed this? It’s also been crashier of late—to the point where I’m actually depending on the Restore Session feature.

I decided I’d set Safari set as my default for personal use and Firefox for work. Rasmus does this for security reasons, I’m just doing it because I need Firefox for web development.

And while I’m wishing that Mozilla move back to their core and fix their shit before they talk about features in Firefox 3.0 that I and nobody else in the world are interested in—besides the three people using microformats. Why don’t they fix things so that when I drag the bookmark to the desktop it uses the page title as the file title instead of part of the URL?

u-whines about Safari: It needs real debugging. Add session restore, how come I lose my block popup settings? Why open “safe” by default? Has the Mac world become that lame? Now that I’m using it again, is it time to Pimp My Safari?

5 thoughts on “Back to Safari

  1. At work yesterday we were talking about how slow Firefox has become.

    i don’t think you can entirely blame firefox. I think it’s a combination of:

    1) more sites using Javascript.
    2) Firefox (and other browsers, to be fair) leaking memory like CRAZY (and not properly garbage collecting it) when it encounters Javascript, even well-developed javascript (which probably makes up 5% of the js out there).

    A couple gmail, google reader tabs will shoot my FF CPU and mem up to 80%. There are sites that I know will immediately kill my browser under the JS load (ie, the dojo toolkit doc page. way to demonstrate why I shouldn’t be using your library guys!)

    It also seems that firefox has made it *easier* to open up a billion windows with middle-clicking and decent tabbed support. In the ‘olden days’, you had to right-click/open new browser, and the taskbar clutter discouraged having too many windows open at once. Now, I might only have four firefox taskbar icons open (yes, i hate taskbar grouping), but easily 60 tabs open between them. I don’t think I ever opened 40 sites at once before tabbed browsing (because that’d just be crazy). Heck, I probably open 6-10 tabs five minutes after starting my computer — in 2000 that’d amaze the sales guy (“whoa look at all those browsers you got open!”).

  2. Well yes, in defense of Mozilla, I could say that half the sites now don’t work with Safari so I never got myself into a position to crawl it the way I do Firefox. 😀

    OTOH, I’m serious. Why did people move to Firefox in the first place (besides the developers)? I’ll tell you what it wasn’t for: it wasn’t for the built-in RSS reader. I’m liking the performance improvements mentioned in the Ars Technica article I linked, and I hope that Mozilla doesn’t forget what brought them to the position they are in while they chase the next big thing.

  3. FF is particularly slow on OS X. It still leaks on Windows (see my twitter about that the other day), but it doesn’t seem to have the same severe performance issues.

    You should check out the web inspector stuff in the newest Webkit builds — it’s really good, and pretty comparable to Firebug. It lacks the JS debugger with breakpoints and watches, but I don’t use that *too* often.

Leave a Reply to tobjar Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.