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It's all spinning wheels and self-doubt until the first pot of coffee.

Bouncing Browsers

I'm annoyed that neither Safari nor FireFox seem to be comfortable enough to use for long on my PowerBook.

Safari seems zippy and easy on my CPU, but crashes at inopportune moments with lots of tabs open. And since the W is next to the Q and there's no quit-confirmation in Safari, I've got yet another way to lose large groups of open tabs. And then there's all the stuff I turned off and deleted to prevent beachballs.

FireFox, on the other hand, seems relatively stable and has many shiny features. Stable, that is, except when the odd Flash movie appears and seizes the whole thing up and I'm forced to euthanize it. That, and, it seems to "leak" CPU usage--no matter how many windows and tabs I've closed, after a few hours usage, FireFox eventually grows to consume all available CPU until I quit and restart.

Eventually, one or another annoyance with whichever of these two browsers I'm using drives me to start using the other. I've got about a 14-20 day cycle going on between them.

Archived Comments

  • Crutcher Dunnavant
    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).
  • pjm
    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 )
  • brian
    check out the Saft plugin for Safari, it saves tabs upon quit/crash among other things. definitely improves the experience for me.
  • Christopher Schmidt
    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.
  • Bill Stilwell
    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.
  • Edward Dale
    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
  • David Rostenne
    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/
  • Rich
    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.
  • Bob Hutchison
    Exactly my experience. The QW thing happened way too often. I've switched to OmniWeb and have been quite satisfied with it.
  • JoXn Costello
    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.
  • Mark Eichin
    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...
  • Aristotle
    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!).
  • steven e. streight aka vaspers

    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.