ive always been a pc guru and recently decided to broaden my horizons and get the best of both worlds by getting a new Powerbook 17" for college. Im happy for the most part except for the basics: cant play most games, interface differs from windows and im not used to it, and most of all safari blows. it was fine for a while but now when im just browsing the net i get these ridiculous notices about how safari found it in itself to shut down. im from the windows world and im used to things not working so i simply dl another web browsers to see if i can just ditch safari. firefox was wonderful back on my windows machine but has the same problems as safari on the mac. unneccessary crashes aplenty. how can i fix this? i send apple the most horrific complaints but i think i need a real solution to this. also, is there a codec pack i can download so im not doomed to look for only quictime compatible files? thats another thing, apple wants me to pay for mpeg support? get outa town jobs you weirdo. im sure this makes me sound like anti mac but i assure you im very pleased overall with my powerbook. thank you for your time
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
New to mac and angry at safari
- Thread starter jamesi
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
The current Safari tends to crash every now and then (especially when exiting/closing tabs from sites with shady (CGI) programming). If this annoys you I recommend you download Firefox 1.5 Beta 1, which, even with a few bugs on its own, seems like a very nice Safari alternative, and the version 1.5 is very fast on Tiger (which the 1.0.x isn't).
I still prefer Safari, because of its superior RSS handling and AcidSearch, but Firefox and its extensions is a very close second...
I still prefer Safari, because of its superior RSS handling and AcidSearch, but Firefox and its extensions is a very close second...
jamesi said:
It doesn't help you, but Safari almost never crashes for me. Perhaps you need more memory? Or maybe you can download Safari Speed, an app that speeds up the page loading speed, which may or may not have anything to do with the crashing. One thing I have found that seems to contribute to Safari quitting is overloading it. For example, if I were to open several busy web pages while scrolling, entering text into forms, etc. all at once quickly. Check your version of Safari. Then do a google search to see if there are crash issues with that version.
How often do your web browsers crash? I can go several days or weeks between crashes on either Safari or Firefox.
As for codecs, you can view almost all video files between Quick Time Player, VLC (for most of the .avi files that won't play on Quick Time Player), and WMP 9 (will play all but the WMP 10 files--those will not play on a Mac). You also will have trouble with some really old .avi files that are Indeo codec encoded. (the only solution on a Mac is to view them in OS 9 with the right codecs installed). You will want to install divx just to be sure. http://www.divx.com/divx/mac/ Keep in mind that they are not yet Tiger compatible there, so hold on while they sort it out.
As for mpeg on Quick Time, you only have to pay for mpeg4, which for almost all users at this point is irrelevant. Very little, if any, web content that I have ever come across is encoded with mpeg4, so for now don't worry about it. You can worry about it if you are making movies on your Mac.
All in all, a Mac is not a PC, but the advantages far outweigh the inconveniences.
Have you installed any tweaks or modifications to Safari or Firefox that might be making it unstable? Or is it happening on any particular sites?
My Safari is generally very stable until I go somewhere like camcorderinfo.com which uses lots of scripting to pull prices in from lots of different price comparison sites and tends to make Safari beachball a lot.
Keep reporting crashes to Apple so that they know there's something wrong but, as a suggestion, don't write them in a 'horrific' fashion since they're far less likely to be acted on then.
If you don't want to pay for QT Pro, try using VLC or Mplayer - downloadable from Versiontracker and can play most things.
My Safari is generally very stable until I go somewhere like camcorderinfo.com which uses lots of scripting to pull prices in from lots of different price comparison sites and tends to make Safari beachball a lot.
Keep reporting crashes to Apple so that they know there's something wrong but, as a suggestion, don't write them in a 'horrific' fashion since they're far less likely to be acted on then.
If you don't want to pay for QT Pro, try using VLC or Mplayer - downloadable from Versiontracker and can play most things.
jamesi said:
When i first got a mac i just used google to search for mac osx video player and a search for mac osx video codecs and i was <sarcasm> pretty amazed at what i found </sarcasm>
I know you are new to the mac and i am sounding a bit like a prick but its not that hard to find these things with google. I AM new to the mac aswell yet i never had to ask these questions because i used the biggest search engine in the world. This isn't linux where installing programs is a nightmare, all you have do is find it, download it, and it works.
Just try adding " mac osx " (without quotes) to your google searchs in future and you'll find everything you need.
When I first got my PowerBook - 18 months ago now - I installed Norton AV & Firewall (out of habit & what I thought at the time was prudence). Safari crashed, Mail hung, OS X crashed, iTunes would not quit. I turned Norton off and all was sweet.
Are you running any 3rd party products that might interfere with internet access?
Are you running any 3rd party products that might interfere with internet access?
