Browsers

[Jenius]

I got kinda tired of FF's memory leaks so I'm trying out googlechrome at the moment, but I find their process for preventing memory leaks creates memory issues of it's own. If I have something like pandora running it's hard to have too many tabs open without lagging things because how chrome handles tabs.

On the brightside I like it's interface allot, the bookmark system is handy (serving more or less as a second row of tabs), the newtab page has some nice/useful information on it (I mean all browsers would have said information if you went through menus, but i like the format), and the search/url bar is nifty even if not entirely original.

My main beef with it is the third click to get the autoscrolling feature hasn't been implemented yet. I used the fuck out of that with FF so I find myself hitting mouse3 all the time to no avail.

So all in all, I'm kinda neutral on chrome, I think I'll keep using it for a bit, but I'll probably explore other options later.

What browsers do you/have you used and why? Would you recommend any?

[Zerg]

I've been using firefox pretty much forever. Heard quite a bit about chrome, but haven't tried it yet. Maybe one day I'll care enough to do that.

[mrs_bun]

Firefoxy. :)

[Avedomni]

We use Chrome pretty much exclusively now, with the sole exception being things that require IE (Neflix, et cetera). The layout is just so pleasant, and it loads significantly more quickly than FF or IE.

We tried Opera for a while, but it just didn't stick.

[Van]

I use Firefox, but I am fond of Chrome as well. I like the more minimal interface, bookmarking, and new tab page. I might try it again after a couple more updates.

[Tee See Em]

I'm now using the Safari 4 beta, and I am loving it. Chrome isn't available for Mac OS, but Safari is pretty blazing fast, the most important parts of the browser (rendering and javascript engines) are open source and in the latest version they've taken a hint from Chrome and put the tab bar and the title bar together, and it looks great.

It's added much better autocompletion as you type in URLs. I don't know exactly what they changed, but it feels about 100x more useful and faster. I don't know if it automatically filled it in without requiring you to select from a list (or press down) before. That's probably it. At any rate, that was one of the things that annoyed me the most when I wasn't using Firefox 3, with its "awesome bar".

It's got a really high-quality built-in (just need to run a terminal command to enable it) javascript debugger and DOM inspector, as well as being able to mask its user agent for retarded sites.

They've also added mostly pointless 3D displays for your most often-visited sites, as well as for history browsing. Looks spiffy, though.


I'm pretty it's available for Windows as well, but like most Apple software (Quicktime, iTunes) even if it's really nice under Mac OS, it's likely to feel pretty bad under Windows.

[Tee See Em]

I use Firefox, but I am fond of Chrome as well. I like the more minimal interface, bookmarking, and new tab page. I might try it again after a couple more updates.Oh, right, their new tab page is a list of your most visited sites, right?

Okay, so Safari got that from Chrome as well.

[mrs_bun]

Ha, that is awesome, JB.

[Jenius]

How do you guys handle the blatant memory leaks? Perhaps I just opened and closed browser tabs more often, but I found myself having to restart firefox far too often because my comp was getting laggy and I'd check my processes and ff was taking up like all my memory.

Also I tried opera for a bit but I don't like how it queues new tabs. I tend to open a lot of things then start ctrl+w'ing to cycle through what I opened, but rather than moving to the right when you close a tab, opera moves to your last open tab (in other words, to the left). I looked around for an option to change this, but I couldn't find it and pretty much gave up on opera then and there.

[Tee See Em]

My main beef with it is the third click to get the autoscrolling feature hasn't been implemented yet. I used the fuck out of that with FF so I find myself hitting mouse3 all the time to no avail. This is entirely off-topic, but that reminded me how much I love the two-fingers-on-trackpad scrolling thing on MacBooks. Yay for having significant speed and fine-grained control over scrolling!

[mrs_bun]

Iono, I never have problems with anything being slow, just sometimes TS will not load randomly and I have to try like 3 times. But like wotc, ut, vogue, pandora, youtube, no prob on any of those at all.

[Tee See Em]

I'd actually really like somebody to give Safari 4 an open-minded test on Windows, so I can know how decent it is. (If you've already tried Chrome for comparison [and because they both blatantly ignore the OS UI] that would be even better.) You can download it here. (http://www.apple.com/ca/safari/download/)

[Van]

How do you guys handle the blatant memory leaks? Perhaps I just opened and closed browser tabs more often, but I found myself having to restart firefox far too often because my comp was getting laggy and I'd check my processes and ff was taking up like all my memory.

I just turn off my computer or close firefox every so often by my useage habits. Only really effects me if I've gone a few days without closing and then try to run something like WoW or Tf2.

[Van]

I'd actually really like somebody to give Safari 4 an open-minded test on Windows, so I can know how decent it is. (If you've already tried Chrome for comparison [and because they both blatantly ignore the OS UI] that would be even better.) You can download it here. (http://www.apple.com/ca/safari/download/)

I'll take you on.

[Tee See Em]

Holy shit, Apple is using the native Windows UI for Safari now.

This makes me hurt a little inside, because I really don't like Window's UI compared with the Windows one, but actually fitting in consistently is important.

Maybe it will actually be a viable choice on Windows now. Interesting.

[Jenius]

I'll give it a shot too JB. But I'll be frank and say I think apple apps are generally really clunky (itunes is such a memory hog). This may just be for windows users though.

[Tee See Em]

I'll give it a shot too JB. But I'll be frank and say I think apple apps are generally really clunky (itunes is such a memory hog). This may just be for windows users though.It's true. The reason for it is something along the lines of Apple having ported a huge amount of there system API over to Windows instead of fighting to restructure their programs code to fit Windows' APIs. Something like that.

But it looks like they're starting to do away with this for Safari, so maybe it will be different.

[Zerg]

Just tried chrome.

It won't take my aero theme and insists on shitty XP colors. I googled themes for it, downloaded one, and it broke it... all red and stuff now.

So, I'll pass until it gets decent theme support or will accept my windows theme.

[Naga]

Safari still has severe memory problems for me. I don't know why this happens, but I usually catch it using 400 MB or so of real memory, as it is right now.

I'm using the new beta, as is Jeremy, and its pretty nice. It needs to combine the search bar and the address bar, though, and make its own awesome bar.

[notallama]

opera.

main things i like:
mouse gestures/generally customizable shortcuts.

tab ordering (thing that jenius doesn't like). most recent on top, just like every other ui ever.
also, you can resize the tabs (well, the window attached to the tab).
mouse3 + mousewheel for scrolling through tabs is fancy.

it used to be noticably faster than ff/ie. dunno if that's true anymore, since i have not used ff in a while.


it's kindof a memory hog, though. either that or i have too many tabs open.
(270mb with 33 tabs)

[Captain Piano]

What are memory leaks?

I use Firefox, BTW.

[mrs_bun]

Memory leaks are where you're just on your computer doing stuff, maybe playing wow, and then all of a sudden you notice you were sposed to pick your sister up from the airport like 4 hours ago and oops your phone was off.

[Captain Piano]

Memory leaks are where you're just on your computer doing stuff, maybe playing wow, and then all of a sudden you notice you were sposed to pick your sister up from the airport like 4 hours ago and oops your phone was off.

:V

[mrs_bun]

D'oh!

[Fonzy]

What are memory leaks?

I use Firefox, BTW.

When a program does something like declare and array or variable and then forgets to clean it up later. Generally will only effect performance on the long-term, in the case of small leaks, as the program continues to declare variables and eats up progressively more memory. Can be negated by a reboot.

EDIT- This post was originally going to include something about putting a card on the top of your library, but then I remembered that was lapse, not leak.

[BlaineTog]

I've been using Chrome for the past few months, and I really love it. It's just much much faster than Firefox, plus the interface is cleaner, plus I like the home page. Sadly, though, it gives you no control over where it installed and even less control over the cache, which means I may well have to give up using it on my netbook until google amends those two issues (my C drive only has 4GB, most of which is taken up by Windows, so I don't really have the 150-250 MB to spare).

[Zerg]

I've been using Chrome for the past few months, and I really love it. It's just much much faster than Firefox, plus the interface is cleaner, plus I like the home page. Sadly, though, it gives you no control over where it installed and even less control over the cache, which means I may well have to give up using it on my netbook until google amends those two issues (my C drive only has 4GB, most of which is taken up by Windows, so I don't really have the 150-250 MB to spare).Fuck that shit, they should give us an option to make chrome look not ugly. It's clearly more important than people with small hard drives.

EDIT: inb4 "my hard drive is 10 inches :rip:"

[notallama]

i have a 3.5 inch floppy.

[mrs_bun]

3.5 floppy is not bad at all. :rip:

[Van]

3.5 floppy is not bad at all. :rip:

Except it's a shower, not a grower :V

[mrs_bun]

:rofl: Oh okay then hehehehe.

[BlaineTog]

Fuck that shit, they should give us an option to make chrome look not ugly. It's clearly more important than people with small hard drives.See, I like how it looks. Well, I like blue, and I like a minimalist interface, and you can get Chrome down to nothing more than a bar for tabs and a bar for the address, and a scroll bar on the side, if you don't want the bookmark bar up all the time. Less is more, IMO.

[mrs_bun]

My main complaint with other new browsers is that I just don't have any complaints with this one, so why bother?

[Tee See Em]

Daring Fireball on Safari 4 (http://daringfireball.net/2009/03/safari_4_public_beta). Crushing my spirit with his logic.

[Cee Pee]

Minefield/3.2a1pre

[Tee See Em]

Minefield/3.2a1pre

Hi Cee Pee! Your post was 18 characters long.

[Jenius]

My main complaint with other new browsers is that I just don't have any complaints with this one, so why bother?

You probably simply don't use it enough to run into issues/have habits that would prevent the issue, but for me, FF's memory leak problem was a major issue (and no, it's not rare, it's one of the things they worked hardest at fixing with FF3, it's a known problem) to the point where I got fed up and here I am, scoping other browsers.

FF may be fine for you, but it clearly wasn't working for me :V.

Also, I'm having this ghosting issue with chrome, like occasionally when I'll go through one of their options menues, after I select an option, it will leave the highlighted option on my screen even after the menu goes away. I have no clue what causes it and the only fix I've found for it is to reset my monitor resolution (which doesn't take long) which is kind of annoying. I wonder if this is a known bug or I'm just doing something wrong.