Let's go surfin' now, c'mon a Safari with me!!!

Just thought I'd update you on my browser experiences.

I've pretty much gone back to Safari (the new Beta) as Firefox was doing some strange things occasionally - like simply not opening up a page when I clicked on a link. It had some really cool features that I wish were in Safari - like scrolling Tab bar and the linkification plugin was way cool.
I've deleted SAFT on Safari - the Ad-blocker - which seems to have stopped the memory usage from going as high as it was, however, it has been running all day and the Safari memory usage is around the 170MB range. I was just about to quit, when a little pop-up warning window appears asking me if I'm sure because I have 22 Tabs open. (this warning is a new feature in this release). So the memory usage isn't too bad considering I have that many Tabs open.

Haven't discarded FF completely and the Flock browser is pretty cool - just needs some plugins - and of course without SAFT - I have to put up with advertising on webpages for a while until Pith Helmet updates to work with the new version.

So I'm pretty happy with Safari v3.0b - certainly not having nay of the problems that other early adopters have.

Time for a new Browser

First posted on Mac Browsers - Nutterz

OK, so I have been slowly getting frustrated with my default Mac Browser - Safari - which up until recently I've had no reason to change from. I have had both Firefox and Opera installed and although they partially satisfied there were always things that sent me back to Safari (Firefox took ages to load for example)

However recently two things have caused me to consider changing from Safari. The first and strongest reason is that Safari has become extremely sluggish and unresponsive lately. Here's my setup:

I'm running OS X v10.4.9 on a PB G4 17" with 1GB of RAM and using the latest version of Safari - with the SAFT plugin to stop all those annoying ads and flash ads. I have a folder of bookmarked sites sitting in my bookmark bar and with one click it opens up all the sites in separate tabs.

OK, so that's the background. Here's the issue. I've been noticing lately that pages have been taking a long time to load, that clicking on links have not been as responsive as I would expect, switching between tabs can take a new a sec or two and the occasional freeze and/or lock-up requiring a force-quit. Which all adds up to me looking at alternatives, not however, before trying to 'fix' it. I have run various utilities which clean out caches, logs, cookies and anything else that might be slowing things down all to no effect. I then looked in the activity monitor to see how much memory it was using and it was using a heap of actual memory and even more virtual memory, basically leaving me nothing free.

So I've been listening to a few podcasts lately and I've heard them talking about FF quite a bit and also another browser called Flock which is still in beta. So I thought I'd give FF another go - and WHAM! it only took about 3 dock bounces before it opened (previously taking about 12-15). I then downloaded Flock and I gotta say it is quite a tidy looking browser, with some quite neat features. So after tweaking FF with a couple of extensions and a nice brushed metal theme - it is now going to be my Browser of Choice - with Flock my secondary one.

By the way - this post has been published using the Flock Browser's built in Blog support! Pretty Cool Eh!

technorati tags:Browsers, Mac, Firefox, Safari, Flock

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