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Do all OS X browsers suck?

R

RichardJohn

macrumors member
Original poster
May 12, 2006
49
0
I've been using a mac for a few months now. Everything is fine with it, except in the very important area of web browsing!
I've been through what I think is just about every OS X browser.
Safari 3 (not beta) freezes momentarily very often, and about twice a day I'll have to force quit it. This happens seemingly randomly. It's just generally buggy.
Firefox 2 is pretty awful on OS X... it doesn't feel right, and it closes occasionally.
Firefox 3 beta is more stable, but it just looks weird. On dialogs and things, the gradient background repeats vertically, and it looks awful.
Flock - alright, but a bit garish and similar issues to FF2.
Shiira.. I liked Shiira for a while, but I'm getting similar freezes to Safari.
Opera - doesn't freeze, and is quite quick, but looks really out of place.

You'd think there's something wrong with my MacBook, but I only have problems with browsers, and my friend has similar trouble.

Is there a browser I've missed somewhere?
 
Hmm, I suppose that makes sense... most sites use Flash in some form.

Why hasn't it been fixed?
 
No problem with Firefox v2 here at all. Works fine, stable, and really fast; unlike Safari which is terribly slow for me.
 
I'm just using Netscape 9, since I like a few of the features they added to the base install.
 
Honestly I think they do, I actually hate all browsers on any platform really.

None seem to bring a total package.

IE is of course IE,

Firefox crashes too much on my Windows machines and isn't native enough on OS X

Opera is just kinda blech, interface is really kind of crappy and busy

Safari is such a little ram hog, I like the browser overall, I don't seem to really have any crashing problems but just with 4 tabs open right now I'm at 387Mb of ram! Might be a leak but overall it just seems to use over 100mb more often then any other browser.

Camino is ok, but it's lack of features kind of keeps me away from it.

I think Firefox 3, when it's final will be my browser of choice. Plugins are awesome, and it should look and be a bit more native.
 
I use Firefox 2 on my Mac Pro and Safari on my MacBook Pro. No trouble with either of them. I haven't run into any flash animations that have given me trouble on either browser.
 
RichardJohn said:
I've been through what I think is just about every OS X browser.
Safari 3 (not beta) freezes momentarily very often, and about twice a day I'll have to force quit it. This happens seemingly randomly. It's just generally buggy.
Click to expand...
Funnily enough Safari 3 works perfectly on my PowerBook, even with the Saft and PithHelmet plugins.

RichardJohn said:
You'd think there's something wrong with my MacBook, but I only have problems with browsers, and my friend has similar trouble.
Click to expand...
I personally think MacBooks have a problem with either the airport connection or Safari. My wife has trouble all the time with Safari timing out on webpages that I have absolutely no problem getting to at the exact same time on the same wireless connection. Needless to say I still find the PowerPC chip to be waaaaay more reliable than any Intel chip. There are other reasons why I believe this.
 
i actually like safari, it has never crashed on me as far as i remember...

the two things i really miss from firefox though are the Tab Mix Plus plugin (which enables a double click on a tab to duplicate, double click on the tab bar for a new tab, middle click to close a tab and the same but on the tab bar to undo the tab close), and the Web Developer toolbar... this web inspector thing has real potential but tbh i dont really know what going on there:

http://webkit.org/

looks like the kinda thing that should be a plugin but you have to download a webkit app which you have to run instead of safari or something... dont really understand but if it did plug into safari would be amazing :)
 
Let's hope 10.5.2 brings more stability in Safari because when it works, it is fast and a joy to use. Its stability, however, leaves a lot to be desired.
 
Are people with crashing Safari using plug-ins? I only ask because I can't ever remember Safari 2 crashing on me, and Safari 3 has yet to crash either on any system.
 
Safari is my favorite browser, but I too have been having problems with it lately.

Some websites seem to give me the spinning ball of death, and then safari crashes on me. Seems like every night, I'll wake up and find a pop-up saying safari has closed.

I think webmail.aol.com is a certain site that does this consistently. It won't crash immediately, but eventually.

BTW, it is just the stock installation of safari that came with 10.5

I've since switched to firefox, hoping that safari will be fixed soon. Firefox works ok (so far), but the GUI is horrible compared to safari. I'm also not a fan of command+w not closing the window when there is only one tab in the window.
 
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