Yeah. It seems to be fine under Windows, but much less so anywhere else. It kind of irritates me that the largely Unix-based Netscape development has transitioned to be not only Windows-based, but to the point that Unix is almost an afterthought. Even the installation is lousy.

They'd be complete retards not to focus on windows, since the vast majortiy of their installations are on windows now. Not that I don't think it'd be great for them to keep the quality level on other platforms as high, but I can't blame them for what they're doing.

Bitt,
How excatly do you change this value? I don't see anything under tools\options, and I don't see an .ini file in the install directory. What's the magic word to find this setting?

-Zeke

If it's like pretty much every other option, you can type "about:config" into the address bar. You'll be presented with a huge list of settings. Huge.

Bruno

Me..

Quote:
i still use it unfortunately, because there's nothing better.

Julf..

Quote:
Ah. Yes. Quite.

A lot of software gets used for the same reason. Another case in point (I don't want to hear any ramblings from Bitt on this) is text Wrangler, the free Text editor from Barebones. It's no less powerful for my day-to-day than their commercial version, BBEdit. But every program is a far cry from what I would prefer. Give me the Amiga's CygnusEd or Windows' TextPad. I'll kep my fingers crossed that sometime within the next few years someone releases something. And that it's not me having to pay for its entire development.

I don't mind "free" but I'd much rather have something I truly like/enjoy using and pay for it.

Bruno

Thanks. I've never done that. I don't usually fiddle with options much.

-Zeke

Because two or three things suck - at different levels - doesn't mean they all don't suck. It just means they differ in degrees of suckiness.

Firefox is headed for a dirt-nap. It's getting worse, not better. 1.5 wasn't a beta release. If they want the air (or rather respect) of legitimacy then they'd better buck up.

I don't use Gimp. I bought Photoshop. Though I hear Gimp is pretty good. I don't use Thunderbird (I can't stand it), I use Apple Mail which I bought (with the OS). I'm willing to pay $1000 for a copy of "TextPad" on Mac OS X. I use Tri-Backup instead of free backup solutions, a commercial password manager, etc.. The list goes on for a long time.

Free can be both a fantastic "deal" as well as very high quality. I didn't mean to imply that commercial = better quality than free (look at Symmantec, it's all commercial and it's all VB garbage). Not all projects are created equal nor are they managed equally. I don't like the way Firefox has been going and Adium has also not been stellar. Fire is also free but has its own problems. There just isn't choice in the IM landscape. Not much incentive for someone to make a commercial IM client for the Mac with iChat and Adium commanding such an install base. Sometimes there just aren't commercial alternatives better or worse.

On the browser front, the selection for Mac OS X is more than enough. But truly, I don't have the time (right now) to spend configuring and changing all the options plus searching for patches to solve all the little nit picks. This is something I've done with Firefox over the course of a year - it was not in its current installed state right out of the box. I blew 2 or 3 days in 2004 researching mail programs and at least half that time was spent in total frustration with Thunderbird. So much frustration that I decided to use Microsoft Remote Client to access my PC for mail. Until Tiger came out and Apple Mail was finally worth a damn.

By the way, where does the opinion, that because something is free it can't/shouldn't be criticized, come from? If you put something out there and make fanfare, you take a risk, regardless of price. Just like I took a risk posting the original message. It was free, so if you didn't agree, you could have moved on to the next thread.

Regarding Adium, I have seen some issues with it from time to time, but they tend to get fixed quickly. A good recent example was the wake from sleep crash I got 50% of the time in 0.86. I find the developers are pretty responsive to both feedback requests and bug reports for the most part. I had an odd issue when I was moving my system to work and back home with multimonitors. I typed up a description of the issue, and sometime in 0.8x the program did a better check to see if the contact list was visible. If it wasn't, it knocked it to a screen where it would be, solving my need to relaunch the program when moving.

Compare that to Proteus, my first IM program on the Mac. I went to the effort to make a XML translator to move my Trillian list over to Proteus, keeping my meta contacts and such. I used Proteus from version 2 to 4, and watched the development go from bug fixes to bug adding. They seemed to want to add some very advanced features, and would do so in release versions without much testing at all. Going from version 2 to 3, I was forced to manually readd all my ICQ contacts, because it finally went to server side contact support. No thought was put into migrating this automatically like Trillian did. Version 4 has stagnated as well with a promise of a 4.5 or something off on the horizon by the new developers for nearly a year now. All this in a paid product.

I'll admit, Adium is not perfect. And they have turned down some of my suggestions forcing me to use two IM applications at work (One for MSN/ICQ/AIM, one for Jabber chat rooms), but overall it is a lot better then the alternatives. I had considered GAIM via x11 once, but stopped looking at it when I realized GAIM lacks basic things like metacontacts.

Regarding Firefox, I only run it from time to time on Windows. I still find that even with 1.5, it's not an OS X application and stands out like a sore thumb. I wish Cameo was more an effort to make an OS X Firefox, complete with extensions support. But instead, it's just a OS X port of the Mozilla render.

I'm not just talking about simple config stuff like setting a couple of preferences. I'm talking about stuff like importing bookmarks (ok, that one can be quick), figuring out how to support quick-searching for services other than Google, trying to get something that will give the functionality of some plugins I've come to use, etc.. Lots of patching to get everything. Firefox needed changes and extensions, so do the others.

I don't go back to Firefox 1.0 because I haven't run that in ages. I had been running a nightly for the longest time and it offered a bunch of features of 1.5 (like enw prefs) that I could not give up by going to 1.0. Plus none of the current extensions I'm using will work with 1.0 - I'd have to go find versions appropriate for whatever version I went back to. I'd gain some speed and stability but I'd lose in other areas.

Other browsers may be worse in terms of site support and/or feature availability (and features can be a matter of personal preference). For the Mac there's also Navigator, Mozilla, Camino, iCab and a bunch of other small ones. Together with your list that's more than I can name for Windows. Not sure how many of these are still supported, but, including IE, they all still work (to some degree).

I mentioned that I started looking at Safari and Camino again. I found it was taking me too much time to get through all the patching and looking through all the plugins and hacks. too much thinking that I needed to dedicate to work. Writing a message like this doesn't take very long and isn't anywhere near as tedious.

Anyway, Safari with some patching has a better looking GUI than Firefox, as does Camino. Firefox has the neat search bar that appears on the bottom of the screen, but you can install real-time type-and-search plugins for the other two. Safari has history in its search, Firefox and Camino don't. Google's toolbar is a BIG plus for Firefox and it does have history. It'd be nice if they made one for Safari which has a much higher install base on Mac OS than Firefox the last time I heard.

Anyway, I like things about all three above browsers - I haven't tried Opera and OmniWeb in years and don't know there's any reason I should try them now.

Anyway, the initial rant was mainly because Firefox has been acting like a pig and because the Camino developers (some of them) seem to be complete jerk-offs. Here's an interesting find in Camino. They rave about making it more Mac-like yet their button press images within the browser view are incorrect. Corrupted if you will.

As far as Firefox being a slow pig, seriously try changing that option I posted about before. It's like night and day for me.

Have you noticed unacceptable performance impact on navigating back/forward (having lost the prerendered views)?

I just changed it and restarted. There's an obvious pause while the view is re-rendered but it's not unnacceptable right now. Let's see if performance overall improves. It was getting to the point where tytping text was slow. Letters would come out in bursts sometimes in edit boxes, including the Google toolbar. Turning this off just lost Firefox another one of its rather unique benefits. if i keep turning stuff off I'll be back to Mosaic sooner or later.

Bruno

Nope. Even back and forward seem faster to me. Methinks that their caching algorithm was tested under Windows and not under anything else.

I think the sessionhistory change in Firefox worked for a couple of days. It's going slow and I'm pretty sure there's something else wrong besides some extra caching. Now it's back to taking up 1.8GB or so of real and virtual memory. With 2 tabs open. That smells like a serious memory leak to me.

Don't know, maybe the problem doesn't exist on the Windows version? Maybe Windows people shut down their machines all the time? I normally never shut my notebook down and don't quit Firefox for weeks on end.

I bit the bullet and am now using Camino. I'm really missing the Google Toolbar most of all. And I can't easily tab directly to the page contents from the address bar (tabbing must step through each of the Toolbar bookmarks before it gets to the page content). I had to install Camitools to get ad blocking (though it has only a faint glimmer of an interface for this), change the titlebar and toolbar to the Unified format as well as enabing a few other tweaks. Camino is definitely way behind Firefox in extras and even behind Safari in this respect.

I'm also not liking the fact there's no "Properties" item when context-clicking on page elements like images. All in due time though. I suspect these things and others may be added by the time Camino 2 comes out, sometime in 2010.

Bruno

Most windows, regardless of OS, come with handy buttons to close them. I don't think you'd have so much trouble if you occasionally closed Firefox.

Yeah, that's pretty much my experience, too. With that option set, I'm back to "power-cycling" the program once a week from a couple of times a day, which puts it back on par with the 1.0 line.

I rarely turn my laptop off, too. But I don't really run into big personal problems closing Firefox every now and then.

I preferred to use Firefox because of its special sauce. That little bit extra that you can't always put your finger on. But that sauce has gone a bit rancid and is giving me a bad case of the runs lately. Maybe once they clean it all up I'll hop on to that band wagon again. I suspect it might only happen in the 2.0 timeframe though. Let's see what Apple does to Safari by that time - for now I think I may just stick with Camino.

Bruno

The Widgets aren't alone. How on earth does Adium take up over 36MB of real memory? It's using more than Mail (at 35MB). And Growl another 13MB?

Ouch.
Bruno

I think OS X is too graphics intensive. It looks nice though.

Interesting new av Billy, trying to do your bit to promote religious tolerance?

Tolerating radical islam is out of the question for me. The avatar is to promote free speech...