[Goldie]

I was so excited when Apple announced Safari. I'm no youngster, even my kids ribbed me that they were never that excited even at christmas. It was fast, it was cool, it was from Apple.

Fast Forward. It takes forever for pages to load. It has an annoying lag when clicking opened tabs. Side by side against Firefox it looks like a newcomer. I know, I know quit complaining and just use Firefox. I do.

I can't imagine its just my household. On 3 differently configured computers! Okay, enough with that. It is just that I WANT TO USE SAFARI and my main concern is this... have I become a fanboy. I shudder to think that this may be true. I've heard whispers from around corners and my daughter swears she just said "woo boy".

I don't know it just seems Safari is going backwards over here.

[osxisfun]

i pay for one of the ebooks (like the tidbits guy is publishing) called:


Safari: How to keep it nimble and optimized..

[maxintosh]

So just use FireFox...

Maybe Apple isn't too worried about Safari since FireFox is out and gaining popularity rapidly.

[lavar78]

Use OmniWeb for a while. Now go back to Safari -- it'll seem lightning fast.

[F_Elz]

so true.

[Anand]

I don't seem to have any major problems with Safari. Speed wise it is just as fast as Firefox plus it has a spell checker (which I need for posting things like this!).

My problem with Safari is that it is starting to consistently hang on ESPN.com and on e-bay.

[brutal]

If you run some terminal commands, Safari will suddenly be faster than Firefox.

(I also recommend cleaning out the favicon-cache and setting the folder to read-only. Favicons cause MAJOR slowdowns in Safari after a while)

[Maflynn]

Originally posted by Goldie:
Fast Forward. It takes forever for pages to load. It has an annoying lag when clicking opened tabs.

I don't have this problem at all, I'm using Safari on a G5 2.0 GHz and a PB 1.25. Both using dialup and wireless.

Did you try repairing permissions
trashing prefs
trashing cache
creating a new user account and using safari.

Good luck
Mike

[TETENAL]

I have no problems using Safari on a 700 MHz G3 iBook. No annoying lags altogether.

Firefox sucks. No Services support. No spellchecker. No native controls in the UI (and here I mean the "chrome" not the web view), so no throbbing default buttons. No down arrow in the scrollbar if the statusbar is hidden. Weird "everything is a sheet whether it makes sense or not" attitude. No proper Unicode support. No menu bar if only the download window is open. No native toolbar with a customization window that behaves like a sheet but is a window (despite most everything else is a sheet that should be window). Ugly controls in the web view (no they don't need to be Aqua, but anti-aliasing would be nice in 2005). Windows terminology in the German localization etc. pp.

[Goldie]

Originally posted by brutal:
If you run some terminal commands, Safari will suddenly be faster than Firefox.

(I also recommend cleaning out the favicon-cache and setting the folder to read-only. Favicons cause MAJOR slowdowns in Safari after a while)

How do you set the folder to read-only? After cleaning out this cache it did seem a little snapier. I do miss spellchecker.

[Randman]

Lock the favicon cache. Empty and deactivate the cache. Turn off Autofill > Others and trim the others down.

[Naplander]

Today I finally stopped using Safari. Too many sites simply won't load, load in-correctly or are too slow.

Using Firefox now, and it seems much better.

[Randman]

Originally posted by Naplander:
Today I finally stopped using Safari. Too many sites simply won't load, load in-correctly or are too slow..

Such as ... ?

[Goldie]

Originally posted by Randman:
Lock the favicon cache. Empty and deactivate the cache.

Great. How?

[johnpop]

I can't decide which I like better :dunno:

On Windows I used Firefox forever, but on this Powerbook Safari is mostly being used. I have both installed

[johnpop]

Originally posted by Randman:
Such as ... ?

Gmail gives me trouble sometimes, other times it works, but slower than FF

[Randman]

Originally posted by johnpop:
Gmail gives me trouble sometimes, other times it works, but slower than FF

Never had problems with gmail. Did you try deleting the cookies and redoing it? The other way, is just set your gmail to forward mail to your Mail.app.

[Randman]

Originally posted by Goldie:
Great. How?

Search is your friend.

Flavicons:

Go to ~/Library/Safari/Icons folder

1. Empty it.

2. Make the Icons folder Read-Only

Cache: Safari Enhancer will do this. Search versiontracker.

Autofill. Go to Preferences > Autofill. Click off Others, edit the others down.

Safari tips.

[IronPen]

This is the same general complaint I have with Safari. It was fast and showed a lot of promise when it came out. Sure, it had it's problems with displaying some sites properly...ok, several sites, but that got better. Tabbed browsing was added...thank goodness...and a preference to set the minimum font size...my eyes are thankful. But what has been added since?

Safari, compared to the Gecko variants, is slower. It's much slower on SSL sites, and I understand this is due to its caching. I like Safari and I'd prefer to use it, but it lacks speed and a few of the features my default browser support...that browser is Camino (recent nightly). For those of you who don't know, Camino is coming along nicely. It offers some features offered by Firefox, but the GUI is more OS X-like. Features I like (some or all are in Firefox also) that aren't in Safari:

1. Automatic image-scaling/resizing.
2. Downloads window automatically closes when the download completes, if you want it to.
3. I can set how many days I want in my History.

With Camino Extraprefs:

1. Disable favicons.
2. HTTP pipelining (although Camino is very fast without it).
3. Ad-blocking. (I also use a CSS with Safari, but for the layman, this is nice to have at the click of a checkbox.
4. Control animated GIFs.

Camino also uses fewer system resources than it used to. It uses nearly the same amount of RAM and CPU as Safari now...take look at Firefox and you'll see what Camino used to do, eating up 300MB or more of virtual RAM, and at least 70 or 80MB of physical RAM.

Scrolling is much better. Smoother than Safari, imo.

Typing in text boxes is smooth and quick.

The only things I miss in Safari are spellcheck and cocoa goodness. Camino imitates it well though. For the speed and features, it's worth the tradeoff for me. Take a look and see for yourself.

New

[zigzag]

I came to the same conclusion about a week ago. I don't like Firefox as much as Safari, but it's much faster. And please don't tell me to use terminal commands to maintain Safari - I'm not a geek and I prefer that it work well out of the box.

[ryaxnb]

Originally posted by lavar78:
Use OmniWeb for a while. Now go back to Safari -- it'll seem lightning fast.

True, but I love OmniWeb.

Clearly, Apple cares somewhat about Safari - Mac OS X 10.4 promises a significantly improved version of Apple Safari 1.5 (my number, have no clue.)
I still campaign for Apple Safari 2.0:
* CRASH PROTECTION!! When it crashes or quits, optionally load the same pages! This is a godsend.
* Side tabs as well? Maybe
* A real toolbar.
* SEARCH the HISTORY! Big deal. OmniWeb does it, Thucydides does it, etc. It rocks
* Read other browser bookmarks. OmniWeb does it from Safari. Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape (they use the same format AFAIK, easy to support all of them,) OmniWeb, IE. I don't mean import them, I mean READ them!
* User Agent settings that aren't hidden.
* Drag links to and from the tab bar.
* Site Prefs and color prefs. Only the really simple ones, like "Clear Fonts" (everything is Times size 15) and "Easy-to-read Colors" (black-on-white.)
* Ad blocking. Simplify it to a single checkbox, "Block most Ads."
OmniWeb does everything here, plus 5 bazillion other features. A newbie would be confused and have hard time rationalizing the cost of OmniWeb.

[ryaxnb]

Originally posted by Maflynn:
I don't have this problem at all, I'm using Safari on a G5 2.0 GHz and a PB 1.25. Both using dialup and wireless.

Did you try repairing permissions
trashing prefs
trashing cache
creating a new user account and using safari.

Good luck
Mike

Same thing, no probs on a slow 900 Mhz iBook w/640 RAM and DSL.

[lavar78]

FWIW, I'd like to chime in and say that I have no problems with Safari. Firefox doesn't seem to be any faster on my PowerBook, but I don't use it very often. Like I mentioned earlier, I just finished trying out OmniWeb. I liked a lot of its features, but it crashed too much and slowed down after a while. I keep coming back to Safari.

[Randman]

Firefox is better than IE on peecees but much slower than Safari. OmniWeb? Pay for a broswer? No thanks, not when Safari is more than up to the job. And don't forget that Safari 2.0 is a few months away.