(no subject)

[quesarah]

Minor complaint: the housemates have a Mac Powerbook G4 running either IE for Mac or an app called Safari. Both of these browsers BLOW. They both randomly quit all the time and neither of them display all that great.

Does anyone know if Firefox for the Mac works well? king_ghidorah, are you using it?

Comments

[king-ghidorah.livejournal.com]

IE for the Mac Mac is more stable than IE for windows but still is crap. And unsupported crap, to boot.

Safari should be stable if the user's MacOS is updated to latest version with all the patches. My experience is that Safari is a rock, but slow to startup.

Firefox for the mac is stable and slow on startup but fast once you get it running. Have also had no problems with it. It's better than Netscape. I have found that Camino, also based on the Netscape/Gecko engine, is faster and equally stable.

Yes, I do have five browsers installed on my laptop. I don't currently have Lynx installed to run on the Unix side, so it's only five.

[madenglishbloke.livejournal.com]

think i out-geek ya there...
ive got the latest versions of camino (rock solid, fast, and gorgeous), firefox (rock solid, fast, not as gorgeous as camino), iCab (fairly slow, too gimmicky), IE (crap!!), mozilla (rock solid, fairly fast, pig-ugly), omniWeb( fast, stable, looks good, but youve got to pay for it after the demo expires), opera (fast, stable, but besieged with adverts), and shiira (somewhat gimmicky, fairly fast) on my mac mini.
thats as well as safari which, quite frankly, blows as much as IE sucks...
thats 9 browsers - thats more than on either my windoze box, or my *nix box...
camino is slightly faster than firefox, and looks marginally better, but firefox has more (and better) extensions - its just down to personal preference.
mozilla, camino, and firefox are all availible from http://www.mozilla.org - for all the rest, check out http://www.versiontracker.com .

[king-ghidorah.livejournal.com]

Nine. You are an alpha geek, truly.

IIRC, Camino is a full Cocoa app with access to cocoa services. That's not even true of Safari. Is it true of any other OSX browser? Of course, there are far too few Cocoa apps out there, which is a damn shame, since the availability of Cocoa services is one of the better things in MacOSX....

[madenglishbloke.livejournal.com]

funnily enough...
alphageek...
and the only reason ive got all them is because when im checking any of my web designs, i like to make sure ive got all my bases belong to me covered.
sadly, having only had the mac a couple of weeks, im still not entirely sure what cocoa is...
what i do know is that that is the reason that camino looks so good - it integrates itself more closely with the GUI than firefox does.

[biogeekgrrl.livejournal.com]

OK so from all the replies I will investigate Camino first, or perhaps see if they've update their Safari patches etc.

Thanks!

[stevienicks321.livejournal.com]

We use Mozilla on our Macs at work, and it works pretty well.

[kimberlychapman.livejournal.com]

Corran uses Safari on his G3 and it works well for him. I rarely hear him complain about crashes from that. Other programs, yeah, but not that. The biggest browser complaint he makes is how many sites do not function on Safari due to bad programming.

He and I have both downloaded Firefox. In both cases, it runs like a snail. Takes forever to load and is slow afterwards. He looked into it and figured out that what makes Firefox run fast for other people is because it is apparently a memory pig, which is fine and dandy if you have a fairly current machine. On our older machines, it sucks up almost all available memory and *c*r*a*w*l*s*. Which is why we get pissy at people who try to pressure us into using it (which happens a lot).

Your friends' G4 might have a lot more memory, though, in which case it would supposedly be faster and better. When/if I have the time/money to upgrade my memory, I may try Firefox again.

[madenglishbloke.livejournal.com]

my mini has 256Mb ram, and a 1.42GHz G4 - which apparently is mid/high end as far as these things go, so i dont have any problems with firefox on mine.
from stuff ive read in some places, one of the other things that mozilla changed with camino is the memory resource problem - although i could be wrong there - not as if thats never happened before ;)

[kimberlychapman.livejournal.com]

Hrm, I also have 256 RAM, Corran has the same or less, but both of us have slower processors so maybe that impacts it as well.

We really need to upgrade, it's just that for four years all we've spent money on is baby baby baby. :/ And now that one is actually coming, we need to spend more!

[madenglishbloke.livejournal.com]

its probably the processor thats holding you back - especially as PPC processors run at around half the speed of the equivalent x86 chip - so its probably equivalent to an intel 2.5GHz chip