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
Blogged with Flock
2 comments:
Safari 3 beta is faster but it still doesn't cure the quicktime problem. Download from the Apple website.
Belinda
Thanks Belinda, yep I've got Safari 3 Beta and in fact am using it to write this comment. When I first used I noticed it was still using plenty of memory but it seems to have settled down now, although I don't have all the tabs open that I normally do.
I can't say I have experienced any Quicktime problems since the QT update recently, either in the player of through a browser.
You could possibly try checking any plugins you have that could be causing conflicts.
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