Better The World


Safari 4 and Firefox 3.5b99

Well Apple has gone and released the memory hog that is Safari 4. It does look good but given that it uses a ridiculous amount of memory I think I will pass. It has some nice features that only work on a mac. Go figure.

Also Mozilla has released a new version of Firefox 3.5. It is marked as beta 99 but is basically something between a beta and a release candidate. it has improvements to Tracemonkey, the engine used to clean up memory usage but not sure it works that good at removing things from memory it no longer requires.

Now Google Chrome has excellent memory handling it’s just a shame it’s options are sparse, it has no extension support (even IE supports extensions/plug ins) (apparently as of version 2 it does) and the rendering engine, WebKit, is far from perfect. Sites like Facebook can prove a nightmare at times when it’s divs disappear behind it’s ad bar.

I’ve personally decided to give Firefox a break and use Flock for a few weeks.

4 comments to Safari 4 and Firefox 3.5b99

  • df

    “the rendering engine, WebKit, is far from perfect”

    What the hell? WebKit is the most accurate rendering engine out there. Even Firefox 3.5 doesn’t pass ACID3. Firefox is the memory hog, and Gecko is a convoluted mess. It also spins up my laptop’s fans where Safari doesn’t.

    • Carbonize

      Try Facebook in it sometime or my own blog’s Last Comments when a long link is posted in a comment. In fact as I write this there is a comment with a link in it and in the recent comments widgets (top left) the links text ends up overlapping the main content. In IE the text goes behind the main content and in Firefox & Opera it wraps. Passing the ACID3 test does not mean you render everything perfectly it just means you went out of your way to make it support the technology used in the ACID3 test.

      As to Firefox being a memory hog and Safari being brilliant you must be the only person to find this as Firefox 3.5 has excellent memory management thanks to Tracemonkey and Safari 4’s memory management on Windows is terrible. http://www.favbrowser.com/browser-memory-ram-usage-firefox-35-rc-safari-4-opera-10-beta-google-chrome-30-dev/ is a good read.

  • Apple Safari takes more resources compared to Opera and Firefox. sometimes it also freezes so i would still stick to Opera.

  • Khim

    i like the design of Safari 4 but i think it uses more resources compared to Opera.

Leave a Reply

 

 

 

You can use these HTML tags

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>