Every few months I get tired of Firefox chewing memory and hanging every 2-3 days, and decide to return to Safari. It’s a dilemma: Safari’s speed, elegance, and stability, or Firefox’s wealth of plugins? For now, I’m going to put speed and stability first and make Safari primary again. I can switch over when I need to do something Safari can’t do.
As long as I’m tweaking the apple cart, decided to finally check out the Safari 3 beta. Love the new in-page search, love the resizable text fields, love the speed. But the RSS reader? Unchanged, as far as I can tell. What’s going on here? Over at my O’Reilly blog I’m letting Apple have it over Safari’s anemic RSS tools:
OK, geek boys and girls, pop quiz: How do you use Safari’s built-in RSS reader as a feed aggregator? Go ahead, take a minute to figure it out. Take 5. Whatever you need. I’ve got time.
Apple – Whatever you do with RSS in Leopard, please turn up the voltage on the de-confusifizer. RSS is important technology, and consumers aren’t going to get excited about it until you simultaneously show them its power and make it simple. Isn’t that what you do best?
Firefox 3 has been stable enough for daily usage for some time. Grab alpha 7 or one of the nightly builds. Memory usage is more than half that of FF2, it renders pages faster and on OS X it now renders form elements using Cocoa widgets. The downside is that very few extensions are qualified for FF3 yet. Some can simply have their install.rdf manifest changed, but the more complex ones require more substantial changes best left to the author.
I much prefer Google Reader to Safari RSS, and it handles Atom feeds properly, unlike Safari.
I’m a huge fan of Firefox on Windows, but can’t stand it on my Mac. I’ve been a Safari user, but have recently been trying out Camino and have been quite pleased with its performance.
Thanks for reminding me about Camino, Andrew. Sounds like it might address some of my remaining complaints about Safari. I don’t suppose it will work with Firefox plugins, will it?
Unfortunately Camino doesn’t offer the same sort of plug-in support that Firefox has. So I still keep Firefox installed for certain browsing moments…
Man, we just can’t have it all, can we? Safari’s speed, FF’s plugins, but with Camino’s cocoa UI…
I have the same dilemma with Firefox and Safari, and I usually have them both open on my MBP. Safari doesn’t officially support plugins, but one cool one I’ve grown accustomed to is Inquisitor. Have you used it?
http://www.inquisitorx.com/safari/
JDC – I had tried it once, had a bad experience, and uninstalled it. Now I’m trying it again (thanks to you) and loving it!
Excellent. Glad you’re giving it another chance.