Comments on: Bouncing Browsers

By: steven e. streight aka vaspers the grate

steven e. streight aka vaspers the grate — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 03:00:18 +0000

Firefox is the best browser for me, yet it has many bugs and deficiencies.

For several months, it hated to go to my Gmail inbox, and would almost alwasys crash. Firefox, until just a few weeks ago, was crashing every 10 to 30 minutes.

About a week ago, my "No Script" javascript permit/forbid bar simply vanished, leaving all scripts forbidden by default. I searched all over my computer for the cause of this. I checked my extensions, and posted a topic thread at Mozillazine forum, about it. My forum post was ignored.

Without the ability to permit scripts at trusted sites, I was screwed. Many things were impossible to accomplish, right? What a nightmare.

I ended up uninstalling then reinstalling Firefox, without the No Script extension.

As far as I'm concerned, the worst part of the internet is the web browser. They all suck. During my problems with Firefox No Script, I tried to lauch Opera, Avant, and IE. They could not find any servers, as though my broadband connection was not working. Netscape worked, but it is so buggy, it's worthless. My blog, for example, was actually flashing and endlessly reloading the main page. Weird.

So I play bouncing browsers quite often.

Love your book, Hacking Rss and Atom.

By: Crutcher Dunnavant

Crutcher Dunnavant — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve ended up using Camino for similar reasons. It crashes very rarely, and I’ve been generally pleased. I avoid Firefox because of it’s new window behaviour (there’s a bug in the geometry code if you’re dock isn’t on the bottom which I haven’t had time to track down and fix).

By: pjm

pjm — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a happy Camino user as well. It has the all the shiny Gecko stuff without the ugly UI problems which remind me, jarringly, that Firefox is cross-platform. (More detail about my browser decision, from last fall, at http://www.flashesofpanic.com/panic/000594.php )

By: brian

brian — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

check out the Saft plugin for Safari, it saves tabs upon quit/crash among other things. definitely improves the experience for me.

By: Christopher Schmidt

Christopher Schmidt — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

I feel similarly, except for one thing: extensions. Can’t get ‘em in Safari or Camino, so I stick with my Firefox. I feel lonely without seeing images on my Google Search pages, or without the FOAFlets in the corner staring at me.

By: Bill Stilwell

Bill Stilwell — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

According to the unofficial changelog (http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/releases/1.1.html), the memory leak should be fixed in firefox 1.1.

I have a freeze-up problem on linux with some embedded movies, so the sessionsaver extension (http://www.extensionsmirror.nl/index.php?showtopic=166&hl=sessionsaver) is a godsend. Killing a frozen browser window is no longer a big deal: everything comes back just as you left it. It can also rescue the most recently closed tab, another very handy utility.

By: Edward Dale

Edward Dale — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Simon Willison had the same problem as you with accidentally quitting Firefox last year and posted a possible solution. It lets you remap the shortcuts for menu options. I’ve got it set up on my iBook with Safari and it works like a charm.

http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2004/06/08/remappingShortcuts

By: David Rostenne

David Rostenne — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

I posted about accidentally quitting Safari a while ago:

“…go in to the System Preferences, Keyboard and Mouse PrefPane, Keyboard Shortcuts and add an Application Shortcut for Safari. The menu item is “Quit Safari” and I used Command-Option-Q as the new shortcut.”

You can still quit it using ‘Q’ when Command-Tabbing through applications!

http://www.theconsultant.net/archives/2004/08/15/how-to-stop-quitting-safari-by-accident/

By: Rich

Rich — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

I use OmniWeb, but back when I used Safari I edited the NIB file to turn off the Cmd-Q shortcut for Quit. That's how much it pissed me off. Not difficult, just crack open Interface Builder.

The only failing of OmniWeb is it's tendency to swell, whether through its own fault or its support for me keeping dozens of tabs open without crashing. It's currently sitting at a VSIZE of about a gig, and I've had it at 1.8GB before. Crazy.

By: Bob Hutchison

Bob Hutchison — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Exactly my experience. The QW thing happened way too often.

I've switched to OmniWeb and have been quite satisfied with it.

By: JoXn Costello

JoXn Costello — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Camino is great ... except it doesn't respect my proxy settings, so I can't use it behind my work firewall. How hard can this be? That's a global configuration setting.

Of course, Apple's own registration software doesn't respect it, so I guess it must be pretty hard.

By: Mark Eichin

Mark Eichin — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

I use safari, windows and not tabs, and losing the 40 or so windows I have open would hurt a lot… even if it isn’t Safari’s fault. So, I wrote monitor_safari.py (details at http://www.thok.org/intranet/python/mac/index.html – warning, it is very rough, but I use it all the time.) It uses the python applescript bindings (via gensuitemodule, not any of the modern stuff) and just wakes up and scans all of the winodws for a url, and keeps a log of changes. Problem is, applescript can’t “see” tabs at all, so it won’t save anything but the one you have immediately open. One day I need to either figure out how to get sessionsaver to actually work (it seems to be simultaneously the most popular and least maintained plugin out there) or hack some XUL directly…

By: Aristotle

Aristotle — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Since noone has mentioned this yet: check out Flashblock ( http://flashblock.mozdev.org/ ). It replaces Flash objects with a button you have to click before the Flash object will be loaded. Very handy, and it gets rid of a lot of irritating animated ads (shock the monkey!).