Funky Dock behavior

[Poseidon]

Two quick questions:

1) Sometimes when I'm running several windows in my browser (Firefox, newest version) and several tabs within those windows, the Dock seems to... lag behind for lack of a better term. Specifically, the icons either take a while to expand when I mouse over them or don't expand at all and there's a delay when I click on a dock icon in getting the program itself to start up. It doesn't seem to be hurting anything that this is happening and closing my browser and clearing cache seems to help; I just thought I'd ask about it.

2) I'm a bit confused about how Keychain is supposed to work. Up until recently I was a PC owner who used a separate password program with Firefox and can't do so anymore since the program isn't PC compatible. I've tried reading the help menus as well as doing a search in the forums here but am not having much luck. Can anyone point me to a "Dummies guide" for using it if they know of one?

Thanks!

 

[wrldwzrd89]

1. Restarting the Dock often cures Dock-related weirdness. You can do this from Activity Monitor (open it, find the process called Dock, and quit it - it should restart itself automatically), or from Terminal. If you choose the Terminal route, issue this command: killall -HUP Dock
2. Firefox doesn't use the Mac OS X Keychain, as far as I am aware. If you need to manage Keychain-related stuff, the tool you need is called Keychain Access, found in your Utilities folder. Firefox passwords are managed from within Firefox.

 

[GGJstudios]

1. Which Mac model are you using? How much RAM do you have? Have you looked at Activity Monitor to see what programs are using most of your resources?

2. Read Mac Essentials for information on Keychain.

 

[Poseidon]

1. Which Mac model are you using? How much RAM do you have? Have you looked at Activity Monitor to see what programs are using most of your resources?

2. Read Mac Essentials for information on Keychain.

My bad: Mac is a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 duo with 4 GB of 667 Mhz DDR2 SDRAM.
And no, I haven't looked at the activity monitor; of course, I didn't really know to look for it in the first play or how to interpret it.

I'm currently running 2 windows of Firefox with 6 tabs total, MS Word, Safari and VMware Fusion. What's confusing is that when I'm looking at the Activity monitor I see each individual process listed out and it seems like it's using rougly 10 of the CPU; however, the summary in the lower left hand corner is flucuating between 3-5.5%.