I’ve been using OS X for a year now, and firefox for much longer. I remember when it was up against IE6. It was a clear choice. When I switched to a Mac it was a clear choice, but now…I’m really really tired of it. I like to browse with a lot of open tabs. Recently I’ve been getting that stupid spinning beachball. And you know what I hate the most about macs in situations where you’ve bitten off more than you can chew in terms of processing/memory? There’s no way to end a task like in Windows. In windows it’s instantaneous. In OS X it will bring up the application killer ™ when it damn well pleases. The point is I want to kill the crap that is slowing my system down! I don’t care if it doesn’t get to finish its thing!
But back to the point. Firefox is slow as hell. And it eats memory faster than doped up Brittney Spears inhales cheetos in the absence of her trainer. But I can’t switch. I only know of four browsers that people use, and googling “best browser OSX” ends up with stuff that is over 4 years old.
Internet Explorer: What are you kidding?
Safari:Safari is okay. For a while there I tried to adapt to it. Switching to a Mac involves changing your habits from Windows-oriented ways of doing things to Mac-ways of doing things. I understand this, and I generally ended up appreciating the change. But safari doesn’t do it for me. For some reason the plugin support seems to suck. I don’t like the fact that there’s no drop down menu for your recently typed URLs (I visit my frequently visited URLs that way: In fact it’s how I do so 90 percent of the time) You can’t close tabs with the middle click, and very annoyingly, once you open too many tabs, you get this little arrow which you click to see the rest. Fine, but you can’t close them! Also, search sucks. In Firefox it does a nice little google-like thing where it highlights each word, and the search box is at the bottom of the window, not another window. If you guys have any suggestions on how to get around these please tell me. I like the bugmenot plugin, but I can live without that.
Camino: I tried it. It seems slower, does’t have plugins, and generally suffers from the things that safari does, interface-wise without having any of the benefits of Firefox.
Are there others that are any good for what I’m trying to do? What about Opera?
Oh, I HATE the spinning beach ball. Usually I seem to get it when something w/animation loads in (usually some obnoxious ad on the sidebar of whatever page I’m looking at). Usually I have to just get into the finder and force quit the browser (which I HATE doing, by the way).
My two cents: Go and get a PC. Or install Ubuntu. Ubiquitous duck-and-run
Huh? I’ve had plenty of memory-hog/leak situations where the process is (1) ctrl-alt-delete (2) go and make yourself a cup of tea (3) right-click the process (4) more tea? …
But I’ll readily admit, I liked browsing better on windows…
But Macs have a lot of cool integration features…I like to drag pics from websites into an iChat window to show to a friend. It works really well. No dialogue boxes whatsoever on either end. We’re always sending random crap like that over the internet.
Yeah, there’s no plugin support for Safari to speak of, and that’s a shame. Hopefully it’s something that gets added in the not too far off future. And I can’t argue with you saying Firefox is a bit pokey. But, just for the record:
There actually IS a drop down menu for recent URLs, although admittedly, it’s not particularly intuitive: click and hold on Safari’s ‘page back’ button, and you’ll get the pop up menu.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding you here, but right-clicking (or control-clicking) on a tab will bring up a pop-up menu allowing you to close a particular tab.
Again for the record, you can do this with any image on your hard drive or any image in Firefox on Windows with the new version of AOL Instant Messenger too. A lot of this integration that Mac users go on and on about is possible in Windows too.
I like Shiira better than either Firefox or Safari. (It’s a WebKit based browser so it uses the same rendering engine as Safari, but it’s much better put together, IMHO).
No, what I meant by that was that in the address bar, if you click the down arrow, you don’t get a list of recently visited websites, you get a list of the previous websites in that tab. In firefox, you get a list of the top 20 or so websites that you’ve ever typed in there. I don’t know how it’s calculated, because the ones you type in once are there for a while, but the ones you use a lot are also there too.
Also with the tabs, I want a one-click close! I know firefox has spoiled me with this, but it’s so much better. I click the mouse wheel and it’s gone.
I tried Shiira based on your recommendation. It has some good features, but also some problems. I gave up because the support forum was abandoned to spammers and there was no word on any new versions. I use Safari (fast and good-looking) and Firefox (flexible with the extensions.) I use Opera just for the sake of a weather-feed widget. Its interface is a little wierd and my main problem is the text never looks right.
I just tried Shiira tonight. Seems pretty much okay overall, but one problem. It doesn’t do flash based movie players well. One thing I do like is that it renders PDF inside the browser. But I still can’t close a tab with a single middle click. Those buttons are so small, and it’s much easier to do it with a click anywhere on the tab. Plus it has the same problem as safari with too many tabs. having said that, It’s certainly superior to safari
I have to say that you seem quite impatient. Depending on your tolerance for response, things certainly could seem like they take a long time. I don’t use a PC much, so I can’t really compare, but it only takes a second or two to force quit an app on a Mac-a long time for some, not so long for me. I use a wireless mouse and I find that overshoots a bit, but except for the pointer correcting, when I want to end a task, it is gone as fast as I can click on the name. Again don’t know how fast it is on a PC, but I don’t find Macs that slow.
I dunno why Firefox is slow as hell for you - I use it on my MacBook (only got a half gig of RAM here, could totally use more) and have a whole slew of extensions and shit installed, and it runs fine for me. The only problem I have with it is that MySpace crashes it - but that’s alright, because I don’t go to MySpace that often.
No, I get the spinny beach ball when I run LimeWire. Firefox, I’m fine with.
Uh, because I had never heard of it before. Thank you. I had only heard of “widgets” as a part of Mac OS 10.4, which I don’t have, and these Opera things. The Opera weather widget is a little neater than the Yahoo one, but the Yahoo one is more efficient than keeping Opera open.
In my expreience Firefox is a little sluggish, on my Emac at least. It doesn’t have the lighting-fast response when you switch tabs and things like that. However, it generally doesn’t slow down. As you use Safari, it gradually gets slower and eventually hangs up unless you clear the cache, cookies and whatnot or just reset the browser. Firefox starts out slightly slow, but doesn’t get any slower than that unless you really abuse it and use up all your memory.