It's back to OmniWeb for me!
So, after a good solid several months' run with Firefox, the constant CPU drain finally got to me and I've gone back to OmniWeb.
Firefox was regularly tops in the usage list, and usually sits on about 33% of my CPU and a solid majority of my 1GB of RAM—which makes my already-slow 867Mhz machine feel like 300Mhz. That, and I haven't had much time to play with GreaseMonkey for awhile, which was my main reason for switching back to Firefox. So, it's back to OmniWeb for me. And man, already this PowerBook feels like it's been greased and waxed.
(Yes, I need a new machine. But that ain't happening for awhile yet, and for very good reasons.)
Archived Comments
Have you looked at Opera lately? I've grown to really like it. Few quirks, but it's just muscle memory things at this point.
Yeah - I keep waffling on default browsers. Tried FF for a while, but it was just too kludgey to use full time. Safari rocks, but I've always had a soft spot for OmniWeb. LOVE the tearable textarea element... I'll be trying OW as my default for a few days. Who knows, maybe I'll stick with it this time :-)
i use firefox, ie and opera.I love opera but it is harder to use.it is sad that opera will not identify itself as ie or mozilla anymore but still. I am awaiting, anybody got any screenshots.
Install the flashblock firefox extension. You'll find your cpu problems go away.
@Stefan: Oh yeah, I've had that installed for about 6-7 months now, but Firefox is still pretty chugly for me.
Have you tried Camino? Most of the sluggishness I've heard reported by Firefox users seems to be tied to the UI? Camino re-wrote the UI using Cocoa.
Any Gecko-based browser will be heavy on CPU... I remember when I had my 450MHz PII with 256MB and running Mozilla was an excercise in patience. I took my current 1.533Gz Athlon with 512MB setup for it to feel smooth.
@Scott: Well, I have used Camino off and on. But, for me, the Firefox UI and extensions are kinda the whole point of using it. (ie. Greasemonkey and XUL extensions) I'm not particularly wedded to the Gecko rendering engine, other than being very happy it's around and does the right thing mostly.
browser+ OS will chew about half your ram, plut panther/tiger's bizarre swap setup forces unnecessary paging. try modifying your /etc/rc such that the defaultpager line looks like: dynamicpager -S 20000000 -H 10000000 -L 30000000 -F ${swapdir}/swapfile
now, that's some weird interaction b/w html italics and markdown preprocessing...
See, I switched from OW to FF for the reason you're going the other way. I found that OmniWeb was a total bogart on my memory. After I switched to FireFox, that seemed to go away. I think that FF may use more memory over time though; not quite a leak, but it doesn't seem to let go of memory as tabs are closed. I'll give your technique a try tonight I guess. I just wish FF would use the blasted Keychain so I don't have to switch back and forth remembering passwords.