Ditching Firefox on the Mac

JohnR · « **on:** 28 Jul 2005, 02:27 am »

Much as I've liked Firefox on Windoze, I'm not liking it much on OS/X (Tiger). It seems to do this weird thing where it uses the Safari download manager, and then it gets confused and won't open any more windows!
Also, it seems to be a real memory hog... I'm getting 360 Meg virtual memory size - !

And I don't like Safari -- it doesn't show you the URLs of links when you put the mouse over them, and the way it colors the URL entry box to show loading progress just doesn't work for me...

So I had a look around. Camino looked good, and I found another one called Shiira. Since I have a minimac with a paltry 256M of RAM, I ran a simple test where I loaded two tabs, one with the AC home page and one with my work webmail. Results:

Firefox: Real memory 39M, Virtual 304M
Camino: Real memory 31M, Virtual 299M
Safari: Real memory 23M, Virtual 125M
Shiira: Real memory 18M, Virtual 130M

Out of these four, I like Shiira best so far. I'll use it for a while and update. (So it doesn't have extensions, but I've never used them anyway...)

Watson · « **Reply #1 on:** 28 Jul 2005, 02:54 am »

I've had problems with the most recent version (1.0.6) of Firefox on the Mac as well. You might want to try Deer Park, the preview release of what will be Firefox 1.1. Even though it's a pre-release, it's a lot better, faster, and more Mac-integrated.

suits_me · « **Reply #2 on:** 28 Jul 2005, 03:26 am »

I would respectfully suggest buying another 256megs of real RAM, minimum. The cost benefit equation is clear. This holds whether particular Mac browsers are good or not - or allowed to be on major sites due to market forces.

JohnR · « **Reply #3 on:** 28 Jul 2005, 10:28 am »

Well, a 1GB stick is on the cards, but for now I have to make do. Quite enjoying Shiira.

jakepunk · « **Reply #4 on:** 28 Jul 2005, 10:49 pm »

You can activate the status bar in Safari by selecting View -> Show Status Bar, or pressing propeller-/ . Why it's turned off by default is a mystery.

JohnR · « **Reply #5 on:** 29 Jul 2005, 03:16 am »

Doh!! Thanks

I was looking in the Preferences...

Shiira is not quite ready for primetime, it crashed on me last night (after a whole day of using it). It's got a couple of really neat features tho, like a "sidebar" with history, downloads, and bookmarks. I'll keep using it and see how it goes.