After having to endure Safari’s short comings, I applied some remedies to address its most noticeable problems — memory leaks and abrupt crashes. But I made my last draw yesterday after its memory issues affected the rest of the computer again.
I have been looking into using other browsers full time, namely Firefox and Camino, both from the Mozilla Foundation, a spin off of good old Netscape (well, actually, Netscape has sucked for the past few years). But they suffer the same problem as to Safari — extremely poor memory management. If you open more than 5 or 6 tabs at the same time for a day or two, you can notice the whole computer slow to a crawl, or worst yet, they crash without saving sessions on the existing tabs.
A few weeks ago, I took advantage of Opera Software and its free download offer and kept the serials just in case. I have used Opera before and it sucked. But it’s been a couple of years, so maybe things have changed.
Indeed, things HAVE changed.
For the past day or so, I have had eight tabs or more open at the same time, and I have not experienced any slow down to my aging PowerBook (knock on the wood). What’s even more impressive is its memory foot print hasn’t creeped up like all the other browsers. Furthermore, Opera came with features that I have had to download extra plugins/tools for with the other browsers (draggable tabs, saved sessions, easier to manage bookmarks… etc). Opera has some user interface inconsistencies. But I’ll happily live with that and just zip through web pages the way I want to — lots and lots of tabs.
I am not ditching the other browsers just yet…. will still need them for testing and such. But Opera is going to be my primary browser from now on.