I’m taking a small break from scripting to write this because my head is feeling fuzzy. I’ve had this low grade cold for about two weeks now and it’s starting to get on my nerves. I’m seriously thinking of just getting a bag of oranges and sucking on them at the office.
Anyways, i have a bit of a quandary right now, and i’ve decided to make a switch I’m not really 100% happy about. If you aren’t a mac user, none of this will mean much, but it has to do with browsers.
When i first got my mac the Safari browser hadn’t been released yet. The ’standard’ browser was the rather horrid Internet Explorer for Mac (you know, the one they eventually abandoned development on?) Terrible, terrible browser. I knew apple was working on a new browser, but for the time being there were a few options to consider, even though some of them getting a little long in the tooth. I settled for a while on the Camio / Camino / NameThisBrowser browser, a great little mozilla project browser that unfortunately never really got the development attention it deserved (it is the most mac-native of the mozilla projects). I tried many others, including icab, omniweb, mozilla, etc… but Camio was the one i stuck with for the longest time.
When Safari came out, i did end up making the switch to using it, at least when they finally implemented tabbed browsing. There are some things about Safari i don’t like (brushed metal - bleah (and no, i don’t want to use a utility to change it :)), but overall the performance of the browser is quite nice. While using Safari, development on the Firefox browser was really starting to take off. It was getting better and better with every release (as with the windows version) until by .8 I was liking it enough to switch to it. I’ve been using it since, and have been really liking it.
From what i understand, the windows release of firefox is almost dead on perfect. The mac release, i feel, still has some unresolved problems, some of which i’ve never seen addressed. First is the fact that very often GIF files are not rendered properly, esp. animated gifs. Often they are fractured, have holes in them, or just look really off. Not always, but when they do, it can be annoying (and sometimes problematic, when navigation buttons are fractured like that). It behaves this way on all my macs and has since 0.9, but i never hear anyone complain about it. I don’t know why.
Another problem is performance. While its well known that Safari does have a faster rendering engine than Firefox and generally performs a little better, for me this difference has finally grown to be enough that i had to switch back to Safari. 
When i mouseover bookmark folders with japanese in them, the rotating beachball of death will rotate for a long period of time before it parses the drop down (this can be really annoying) and lately (esp on my laptop) the browser is so slooooooow… there are huge pauses between switching tabs, scrolling, going back to the browser from another program… Bad enough that i decided i can’t deal with it anymore. Safari works fine and doesn’t hang and irritate the hell out of me, so even tho i don’t like it’s interface as much, i’m gonna switch back for a while.
I really like Firefox. I mean, i really do. I dislike the idea of using all apple products (i think there is something a little creepy about apple’s desire to control everything you run on your mac, but maybe that’s just me) I figure that if my laptop had a bit more memory maybe it’d be fine, but i can’t use two different browsers on my two machines. Maybe its me, but the browser you use is the window thru which you interface with much of the web, and when it is getting in your way and not helping you, it’s hindering you. If Firefox ever manages to fix this gif problem, the way it deals with JP text, and and maybe i get more memory for my laptop, i’ll switch back (i hate the fact that you can’t command click on bookmarks in your menu to open a new tab, i HATE that) but for now i’ll just get used to hitting command-T first. In the end its faster than waiting for Firefox to catch up.
ok, back to work on the comic 
- pirotunes: Stars Of The Lid - A Love Song (For Cubs) Part 1 -
Wow, that’s odd — in my (very limited) experience with Macs I’ve never seen these problems you’re talking about. The rendering engine is exactly the same cross-platform, so any problems with GIF files should show up regardless of whether you’re on OSX or XP.
I don’t know anything about the problem with multiple character sets, since I don’t use them. Maybe check Bugzilla and see what you turn up?
Anyway, if you have a few minutes to burn you may want to try this: copy your bookmarks file to the desktop, along with your form data and passwords (if you have FF set to remember them). Uninstall FF (on a Mac that just means deleting the folder, right?) and delete your profile folder. Reinstall FF and run it. Quit FF and drag your bookmarks and saved form data/passwords into the new profile.
Maybe that’ll work, and maybe it won’t. But having old profiles around, especially pre-1.0, has caused problems from time to time. You may also want to set your download manager to empty itself every time the browser closes (I think it defaults to remembering everything forever).
And don’t worry too much about Safari. If they’d just make tabs open in the background, stop wasting space by putting the close-tab button in each individual tab, and make the UI stop looking like a retarded version of QuickTime it’d be a good browser in its own right
You can also set certain preferences in firefox by using the about:config page (just type it in the address bar). There’s more on this at http://forevergeek.com/open_source/make_firefox_faster.php
Ok, I forgive you as you are busy with the comic for tomorrow, but there are ways to solve some of your problems:
1. The Performance:
You could try to use an optimized build for your Mac. I suppose you’re using a G4, so this would be the build of choice:
http://homepage.mac.com/krmathis/
Use the aviary builds.
2. The Performance part II:
You can speed up page-loading and page rendering by tweaking some hidden settings.
Either you dig your way through this thread here:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=53650
Or you choose the easier, not so efficient way, and try this extension here: https://addons.update.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?application=firefox&id=327
(This extension only tweaks the network a bit. No page rendering influnce, so you’d better look into the thread. You can access the hidden prefs via about:config)
3. The bookmark-problem:
http://click2tab.mozdev.org/
Install, be happy. A left-click on a bookmark should now open a new tab.
About the gif and Japanese-chars problem:
Can’t help you there. I don’t have problems with GIFs. Do you have an example?
i thought you had to have some kind of language pack installed to be able to see japanese characters. at least thats how it was with IE back in the day. but anyways, about firefox, it does indeed run a lot faster if you tweek the stuff in the about:config page like the other guys said. i need to uninstall and reinstall firefox to hopefully fix a problem–ive been having trouble downlaoding patches and stuff. the download manager doesnt give me an option to open or save, so i cant even begin a download. very odd.
Originally, there was going to be a seperate release of Firefox 1.0 for Mac, a week or two after the Windows/Linux releases; this was to polish up some of the Mac specific problems with the browser.
Unfortunately they felt this would take too long, and released it as is. The planned changes have been pushed back to the 1.1 release, which was originally going to hit in March. Being a software project, this too has been pushed back, of course.
But the problems you’re experiancing might be fixed by then, so even if you switch to Safari now, try again with the 1.1 release (whenever that comes out…)
You should definately check the performance with a clean profile, though; it might be an extension you’ve installed which is slowing the browser down.
Oh, I think I find the bug for the gif problem,
bug 239701: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=239701
Apparantly changing the display settings can be a workaround, as someone said:
“I can confirm comment #44; when changing my display settings from “thousands of
colors” to “millions of colors” the bug doesn’t manifest in either firefox or
thunderbird. Switching back to thousands causes the bug to return.”
I use a varity of different Mac’s at college (hopfully soom i’ll own a G3 Mac Laptop).. and i know what you mean by teh horribly interent explorer.. theres only a few in teh whole college, woh know about Safari being on it.
Damn not been’ able to download anything at college =(
You didn’t mention Opera (which should have as its motto “The Other Browser”) but it’s worth a spin. I use it under Windows and Linux quite happily. Liked it enough to buy licenses for both platforms.
The unregistered copies run as “ad-ware” with a banner advert in the upper right corner of the window.
Tabbed browsing, great pop-up blocker, OK cookie handler.
http://www.opera.com/download
you could try a recent tinderbox build of firefox… the windows builds have been quite a bit faster than 1.0 and i’ve seen quite a few mac-specific bugs being fixed recently… apparently the gif bug hasn’t been fixed, but changing your display settings to millions of colors instead of thousands should make it go away…
I have to agree.
OPERA, OPERA, OPERA!!!
I love Opera. I have used for like 7 years. Tabbed browsing, gestures, open in background from center mouse click, resumed browsing (restarts all the pages when you close), fast as can be, very mulilanguage friendly, chat, email, etc…
As for the ads. Go to preferences->advertising and set to relevant google text ads. Then easily ignorable after like your first 10 minuites, then when you DO look up there, you find they have relavent info for what you are googling.
I love this browser very much.
Oh yeah. I have installed Opera on PC’s, Linux, AND Macs. Things were a bit different because I was going “HOW THE HELL DO YOU RIGHT CLICK ON A MAC?!?”, but other than that, things went fine. My sister found very useful (she uses macs at school, I don’t. No engineering software for macs).
I’ve had the animated gif problem with firefox, but only when viewing them in phoobucket. When I post them on my blog, they work just fine. I haven’t had any problems other than that, but then again my mac is a dual 1.8 with 1.25 GB of memory. I actually have safari open on my right monitor, and firefox on my main (left) monitor. *smirk* I still tell just about everyone “do ourself a favor and get Firefox, and dump IE” We have that horrid IE browser on our macs at school, and people actually USE it when they have Safari and Firefox in the dock! Hello!
Firefox definitely still suffers from a few issues on both Windows and Mac. There’s definitely a memory management problem (open and close a bunch of tabs… poof) and if you let the downloads manager get too deep (hundreds of file pointers) the performance of the whole package seems to go to hell (moral: clean up the Download manager regularly). I also run into the issue of Firefox telling me its done when actually.. the transmitting server timed out (half done page.. I’m done!
) baka, no you’re not.
That said… for Windows users, it still beats the hell of “haxx0rs kick me” IE. Safari does a spiffy job and my attitude is if it meets your needs more use it… just check on Firefox progress occasionally.
I love Opera but can’t comment on its performance on the Mac. Basically any browser that anyone has heard of is probably more secure than IE and more robust in handling websites (except those crippled websites developed with Microsquish tools like Frontpage).
I know how draining colds can be, I am finally getting over a cold that turned into a sinus infection which turned into an eye infection. I find that the halls cough drops with menthol, although they taste horrible, work quite well towards making you feel better. Oranges are a good idea too.
okay, this might be a stupid suggestion, but buy a Mac and a PC. That way, you can do all of the things you want to do and get the best features from both types of computers.