Is it me or does FF suck on a Mac?

[LuckyTaxi]

At first I thought it was my iBook, but I accidently opened Safari and noticed how quick it opened a couple of websites. I decided to use Safari for about 2 hrs and noticed a huge difference. Does Firefox really suck that much on a Mac?

I have it running on my winxp laptop and it seems to be fine.

 

[TMoney468]

Firefox does take a while to load on my C2D MBP, but I just deal with it because I prefer Firefox over anything else. Camino is another alternative and it loads a lot faster for me than does Firefox

 

[LuckyTaxi]

I tried Camino, but a lot of pages dont render correctly.

 

[mrmann14]

My bro says his FF sucks on his macbook

 

[Skitzer]

I use FireFox exclusively on my eMac. I have tried Safari, Camino, Opera and FF beats them all hands down. It does take a couple seconds to load but seems much faster than the others and I can't live without certain extensions and themes. If Camino was customizable I would probably switch but I stay away from Safari and Opera.

 

[chcarnage]

FireFox isn't great on OS X, speed-wise. Another Gecko-based browser is Camino. Camino with Camino Tools are a good alternative to FF on OS X. Both can be found at versiontracker.com. There's a Slashdot discussion here about the different focus of FF and Camino.

 

[CTho9305]

Originally posted by: lilcam
I tried Camino, but a lot of pages dont render correctly.

Camino uses the same rendering engine as Firefox. Unless you were using an older version of Camino, that shouldn't happen.

 

[oldsystem]

It is slower than Safari on my MacBook Pro. But like someone else said, I suffer through it anyway because I prefer its extra features. Like addons; and maybe that's where the performance takes a hike?

 

[Bowsky]

I have a MacBook Pro and I does take a long time. Unfortunately none of the other browsers for OS X have all the feature I use in Firefox. The good news is, this problem has been brought up and I saw awhile ago, although I'm not sure where, that Mozilla is going to start to address a number of concerns addressing the OS X version of Firefox, speed being one of them.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: CTho9305

Originally posted by: lilcam
I tried Camino, but a lot of pages dont render correctly.

Camino uses the same rendering engine as Firefox. Unless you were using an older version of Camino, that shouldn't happen.

Camino's always out of date.

 

[Codewiz]

well I never shutdown and always have firefox open so it isn't an issue. Recently the Firefox developers acknowledged the crappiness of firefox on Mac and said they were going to address it. My biggest issue with FF was not using keychain access. 1Passwd solved that for me.

 

[CTho9305]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: CTho9305

Originally posted by: lilcam
I tried Camino, but a lot of pages dont render correctly.

Camino uses the same rendering engine as Firefox. Unless you were using an older version of Camino, that shouldn't happen.

Camino's always out of date.

Touché.

 

[SoundTheSurrender]

Safari is where it's at.

 

[ubercaffeinated]

Originally posted by: SoundTheSurrender
Safari is where it's at.

i'm inclined to agree. firefox, while i deal with it, is horrible for media on the web. pix websites like chans or youtube or flash sites are almost always rendered quicker and more "accurately" in safari.

this is on a cd 1.83 ghz macbook with 2gigs of ram...

 

[halfadder]

I personally use the latest builds of FF, Camino, and Safari/Webkit (Webkit is the opensource KHTML engine behind Safari).

http://nightly.webkit.org/
http://www.caminobrowser.org/download/releases/nightly/
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/

You can also try "optimized" FF builds from this site:
http://www.furbism.com/firefoxmac/

 

[ubercaffeinated]

Originally posted by: halfadder
I personally use the latest builds of FF, Camino, and Safari/Webkit (Webkit is the opensource KHTML engine behind Safari).

http://nightly.webkit.org/
http://www.caminobrowser.org/download/releases/nightly/
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/

You can also try "optimized" FF builds from this site:
http://www.furbism.com/firefoxmac/

niceee

thanks for the links. is FF 3.0 alpha 5 stable enough for daily usage? i was personally waiting for them to make it to beta before trying. and what's so good about webkit?

 

[halfadder]

Webkit is simply the engine behind Safari.... Safari is the GUI, Webkit is the HTML rendering engine. Webkit is opensource and is also being used in products by Nokia and some new Adobe thing. By downloading the latest WebKit you can try out the newest changes and get a preview of what HTML rendering features Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard will have.

Keep in mind that Webkit is just the engine. The Safari GUI does not change when you try the WebKit download. The new features will be in the rendering of the HTML only (more CSS3 features, faster, etc) but no new application/gui features.

As for stability, the only way to know is to try it out. For some of the AJAX/Javascript heavy sites I go to, I often find these newest nightly builds to be way more stable than older, released, "stable" builds. YMMV.

 

[AmigaMan]

Although FF does indeed suck on my Mac, I prefer it since I can't do my job without some of the extensions. I like how fast and stable Safari is.

 

[xeemzor]

I find that the normal firefox build does indeed suck on os x. It's slow, bloated, and takes forever to load. However, I have been using the optimized builds with the aqua widgets and so far it's been MUCH faster.

I would stick with safari, but I can't stand the fact that you can't move tabs and there are no plugins for it.

 

[cmdrdredd]

plugins...so useless for me. I want to browse a site fast and nothing more.

 

[CptObvious]

FF takes forever to start up on my C2D Macbook, but once it's loaded it's just as fast as Safari or Camino. If you don't shut down regularly, I'd say it's a good choice.

 

[trmiv]

I think the FF developers mainly focus on Windows, and other OS's suffer. I use PCLinuxOS linux and before that Ubuntu Linux, and I think FF sucks in Linux as well. FF on Linux is slower than it is in Windows, and it crashes more than in Windows. But I continue to use it because I love the plugins.

 

[ubercaffeinated]

Originally posted by: CptObvious
FF takes forever to start up on my C2D Macbook, but once it's loaded it's just as fast as Safari or Camino. If you don't shut down regularly, I'd say it's a good choice.

I'm not talking about initial start up, my complaint with FF lies more with rendering speed, and loading of sites that are media heavy (ajax, java, or chan img sites even). plugins media is slow in FF OS X where as it is quick as butter in Safari. :/

FF3 is supposed to be our savior right?

 

[brich]

In my OSX dock right now are FF, Safari, Camino, Opera and OmniWeb. On my Macs, I find that OmniWeb is the fastest browser, and also allows for individual site-specific preferences. OmniWeb is not a freebie, but I've grown quite attached to its speed and functionality.

 

[ubercaffeinated]

bleh i'm not sure if i'm willing to pay for a browser. safari works well enough minus ajax. i can switch between FF and safari, and wait for both to improve. webkit works well too.