Since I’ve been hearing a lot of complaints lately about extreme Firefox suckiness (it works fine for me at work), I want to alert everyone that I no longer use Firefox at home at all because my computer is way too slow to run it. For a very long time I stayed with Firefox because of the extensions. I was willing to wait four minutes for it to load, and 30 seconds to switch tabs, because my I believed my browsing experience would suffer if I were to lose my beloved tabbed sidebar.
Safari is much less extensible than Firefox and the tabbed sidebar is not a very popular extension at all, so I never expected to find a substitute. But when I went searching for it, I found this pretty interesting (but alas, old) explanation of the Safari Stand plugin.
When I went to the Safari Stand site I was overjoyed to see that it’s still in active development! I did have to install SIMBL first, but that wasn’t much of a problem at all.
I’ve been using Safari Stand for several months now and it is phenomenally awesome. It is also very stable – I think Safari has crashed only one or two times in that whole period; both times my tabs were recovered without trouble. I also use plugins to block advertisements and flash videos. Everyone should use Safari with the Safari Stand plugin (sorry, it’s only available for the Mac version of Safari) at least as an auxiliary browser set up, assuming you rely on certain specific Firefox extensions. I don’t know what I would do without it.
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B”H
I should check it out. I’m also waiting with bated breath for an email from Google informing me that Chrome for Mac is ready to go. Everyone raves about it.
I’m still with Firefox for now. No major problems,…yet.
I have to get a hold of Leopard though, but that’s another story for another time. Someone’s “supposed” to be sending it to me.
Not sure why Firefox is so slow for you… runs without issue on my ThinkPad, which is nearing the 2-year mark. I did, however, recently get a netbook and am going to try Chrome on it — I’ve heard good things and the netbook would especially benefit from some additional speed and screen real estate (although I’ve been pretty successful configuring Firefox to maximize it). One useful extension I added on the netbook disables all Flash (unless you whitelist a site or click on the Flash applet to specifically play it)–unbelievable how littered websites are with Flash apps, and how many resources they consume.
I’ll stick with Firefox in the end.
@YBY
Chrome for Mac is not going to do anything for you that Safari doesn’t do, except pass information to Google about everything you do on the web. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it, but it does mean you shouldn’t be so excited for it.
If you have an Intel Mac, you should be able to upgrade directly from Tiger to Snow Leopard. Apple had announced that anyone running Tiger would have to upgrade to Leopard first and then Snow Leopard, but plenty of people online have pointed out that Apple was not telling the truth.
@Eric
My PowerBook is pretty old – I got it before I made Aliyah, and I’ve already been in Israel more than five years. It’s comparable to a lot of netbooks out there (1 GB RAM, 1.25 gHz, 80 GB hard drive).
I love the Flash blocker extensions and I swear by them. I block Flash in Safari and I have a separate extension that blocks many advertisements and replaces them with … white space!!!
@Terry
Perhaps you will, but how will you know when the end has arrived?