I second Opera. I use it on my low end laptop (Like, 300Mhz, 96M), and it allows me to open dozens of tabs with an imperceptable performance hit. While I like Firefox on my other PCs that have some horsepower and RAM, it’s just too much of a resource hog for some situations.
So do I. But I also use and like IE 7.
Apparently Firefox 3.0 is supposed to be cocoa native, So I’m downloading it now, and I’ll give my opinion here
Also, if you can get to Terminal, you can type “top”, find the processID of the application you want to kill and type “kill [processID#].” I do this often when killing through opt-cmd-escape is being a bitch.
Well, I tried the new firefox alpha and it’s not helping…
I’ve stuck with Shiira for now being that it’s the least annoying of the bunch.
And no…CMD OPT ESC is shit. Sorry, it makes you wait. In windows it’s an instantaneous thing. I generally have a lot of shit open at once, and yeah I probably shouldn’t but still, when I want to kill an application that is slowing everything down, why should I wait until it finishes what it is doing? Macs are stable as hell, and I’ve never had one freeze up, but if you do too much you can end up waiting before you can close a few things.
I’ve got activity monitor on my dock, but you’ve got to start that up, which takes a while too.
Like I said, kill it in terminal. It’s instantaneous.
I personally have no problems with Firefox on my Mac, but have you tried SeaMonkey (also from Mozilla)? One of my PC friends raves about it, but I don’t know how good it is on OS X.
Isn’t blaming your OS for your web-browsing experience kind of like blaming your car manufacturer for what’s on the radio?
Install more memory. I have an old G4 system and I don’t have any problems running Firefox or Safari, or killing processes.
I want to second this notion. Putting more memory in a stock Mac makes it do everything orders of magnitude faster.
Exactly. That’s why I won’t ever buy a Ford again.
What is this about not being able to close Safari tabs? I’m using Safari right now, and all my tabs have little X’s on them. If I click an X, the tab closes. What’s the problem?
Firefox is a big, bloated memory hog - I think adding an additional 512 MB of RAM will solve a lot of your problems. I have 1GB on my PowerBook G4 - it’s three years old, and still runs great.
Also, to kill a frozen application quickly - hold your mouse down on it’s Dock icon for a few seconds, and select Force Quit. Near-instantaneous.
First, I’ve already got a gig of RAM. Second, it’s the thing about clicking the little X to close the tab. On my desktop I’ve got a windows mouse. I can close firefox tabs by middle clicking anywhere on the tab… much quicker.
What about command+W?
You do realize you can get a three button mac mouse?
or, you could download the source code for Mozilla and fix it yourself.
Why would I need that? I’ve already got a three-button windows mouse. It does exactly the same thing.
I’m surprised to hear that you are having so much trouble. My system is almost surely a lot more underpowered than yours, and I browse just fine on Firefox.
My Mac at home is an almost 7-year old 400 MHz G4 tower with 384 MB of RAM. I’m currently running OS X 10.4.8.
I just upgraded the operating system (from 10.2.8) about a month ago, and am intending to add some more memory.
I use Firefox as my main browser and have had no problems, even though I haven’t added more RAM yet.
My backup browser is Safari. My backup-to-the-backup browser is IE 6, since they stopped supporting it for the Mac. I used IE 6 as my main browser until about a year ago.
As far as killing aps, I have a lot more success on my Mac than my work computer (HP running Windows XP Professional). The Windows Task Manager often will not kill a process, and I end up having to do a hard reboot (switching off the power). With my Mac, bringing up a Force Quit almost always works if I get a spinning beachball of death.
My personal experience with Cmd+Opt+Esc is that if I try to trigger it when the misbehaving application is topmost, it will lag exactly as you describe. However, if I first click on the desktop or Alt+Tab to bring the Finder to the foreground, then do the Cmd+Opt+Esc, it responds quite quickly. That’s just my experience, but it might be worth trying.
Can’t you configure middle button to do a Command-W? That’s what I’ve done and close tabs and windows in many programs with a click.