I've been playing around with browsers lately....
In fact, since Google Chrome updated the developer beta for Mac this last week. I had been using Firefox for years now. I Always placed it at the front for being all around awesome. Plugins, customizing, and such. Specifically, plugins that, in general, made my life easier. Mouse gestures, synchronization of bookmarks over a cloud (to not just other computers with Firefox, but to Safari, and subsequently my iPod's Mobile Safari). Firefox handled images in a great fashion, especially my animated sig. It was awesome.
My not-so-frequent ventures into the about:config screen may have screwed up over time. And now it's rather slower. Slow on start-up, terribly slow at loading YouTube videos and frame-by-frame slow on un-cached gifs. My processors aren't doing a thing, and RAM is sky high for just rendering a website. Oh yeah, and when I'm typing, once in a while it would lag and just stay still for a second. This is really bad for me since I do typos quite a bit. But not just typing, everything freezes for those few seconds; animations and scrolling too.
Shiny? Meh...
So just a few days ago I jumped into Chrome. This is an incomplete build on the Mac so far, so I'll be checking in with it frequently. But here are my issues so far: No bookmark importing. Maybe I could squeeze them all in if I imported to the Google Bookmarks service, but I didn't bother with it at the time. Java also seems to not be loading. And finally, the clipboard. The center-point of copy/pasta. I can't copy images from the web, and paste them into Photoshop. I could "drag" it in if I jumped through some hoops, but in the end it wasn't worth the effort when I have 2 more browsers to put to use.
Fat lady sings...? Not quite.
Now I've taken the plunge into Opera. I've never been fond of the UI or logo or it's occupancy of my screen real estate. And during the process of writing this, I find another annoyance: If I were to type a sentence, have it line break, and decide to go back up and correct a misspelling, the bottom-most line would not be visible anymore. It would scroll me up and not go back down to the line I was typing until I either cleared the line and tried again or just hit enter and backspace to try again. It gets rather bad, like I said, I typo quite a bit. Mouse gestures are fine and dandy on Opera, it's just that I haven't found where to customize them yet (remember, I'm on Mac it's not under Tools > Preferences/Options or something). I also really detest the way it handles tabs and switching amongst them. At least Image properties show an image's dimensions, RIGHT SAFARI‽
Speaking of which...
I've finally come to Safari. I didn't go to it first because I had already made use of it a few months back. And all was good except for a few unusual things... As hinted at above, I don't get a special window with information when checking an image. I don't get told the format, the dimensions or the url in which it is kept. Well, technically I do if I inspect it. Which loads a section of the page's code and graphically tells me the dimensions. It also tells me the URL and format in one line (hint: the URL has the file format in it anyway). The only difference is that having a pop-up window appear tells me cleaner information and I don't have to dig around a bit of code. Rendering animated gifs displays them at a slower frame rate. That little bottle on many of our sigs ain't jumping as fast as it did, or is supposed to.
So, Mr. Metal_Link, where did you settle?
For now, Safari 4. It always held a spot in my Dock anyway, right next to Firefox. Safari isn't the IE of Apple that I once thought of within the first few days of owning this Mac. It's the most tolerable browser for me right now.
So what have I done about my precious add-ons from Firefox? Apparently, there are system-wide add-ons for mouse gestures and multitouch trackpad gestures that will work with any app, I've got those set up now. Foxmarks became XMarks and works with a lot of browsers now. GlimmerBlocker is my replacement for AdBlock Plus. Though it's no where near as good. However, I could have AdBlock if I ran Safari in 32-bit mode. Cooliris also needs 32-bit to work in Safari 4. Oh, and no hammer time when I hit the stop button. So we'll see in the future if I switch Safari back down to 32-bits if I miss those features so much.
Oh hey, D-bag! Where's IE? You're not being too fair here... Hey! Stop ignoring me! bla bla bla bla bla...
Microsoft ceased development of IE for Mac on July 11, 2003 and the last stable version was IE 5. If I already think terribly of IE 6, god knows I want to stay as far away as humanly possible from version FIVE of the blasted thing. *shudder*
So that's what I did this weekend. :lol:
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