I got really frustrated with how painfully slow Firefox gets when opening new tabs, so went through my seasonal try-every-browser-known-to-mankind phase last night and today. At the moment, I’m in Flock. It’s based on Firefox, but doesn’t seem to suffer from the glacially slow new tab/window creation problem I get in Firefox. I think I’ll try Flock for awhile. The integrated blog editor is nice, as well as built-in Flickr and del.icio.us love. I’ll stay with it at least until it pisses me off. I’m fickle that way.
wait. why doesn’t flock’s rich text editor in the blog post window NOT have an image button? I can drag images from Flickr right in there, but can’t modify the image HTML without switching to source view? Oy.
And Flock STILL doesn’t sort categories when posting a new entry? Seriously. WTF, Flock?
Update: Had to go in via the WordPress UI because Flock double-posted (the edit was sent as a new post, despite the “edit post” checkbox being checked). I think I might stick with the WordPress web UI for managing the blog…
Update 2: Gave up on Flock. It started showing the glacial-tabs-and-windows I see in Firefox. Makes it unusable when constantly opening new tabs and windows. Back to Safari for awhile. I’ll likely stay there until I get frustrated by lack of support for rich text editors like TinyMCE, which is used in every piece of software I use…
Update, the third: On to a nightly build of Camino. It’s got Gecko for compatibility, and it almost feels like a native MacOSX app. Close…
{ 20 comments… read them below or add one }
Hmmm, I use FF on windows and Mac every day with dozens of tabs and have never experienced slowdown that I could attribute to tabs. I wonder if you’ve got a weird extension that’s draining memory? http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9015599
Flock didn’t have any extensions… And my system has 2GB of RAM so it shouldn’t be running out of memory (but that’s what it feels like – VM spooling). The delay I’m meaning is a 2-5 (or as long as 15-20) second delay when trying to spawn a new window or tab. Firefox just freezes until the window/tab finishes opening…
I had some similar issues with Firefox and to some extent Safari on my aging Powerbook….FF is still sluggish on my newish iMac. I switched to Camino since it seems to play nicer with TinyMCE as well most things I use….a little like a bridge between FF and Safari. It’s not perfect but seems to work more often than not. I blogged about it awhile ago and haven’t switched back yet.
Opera all the way, baby!
I’ve never really been a fan of Opera. I thought you’d have recommended iCab though
I’m in Camino now, and it’s pretty nice. It doesn’t have the level of granularity that Firefox has when saving passwords (only wanting to save one username/password per server, instead of per directory like Firefox does – making developing multiple sites on the same server interesting…)
Most Firefox extensions work in Flock. Moreover, flock has a map extension that is awesome. Namley: geoFlock.
Flock 0.8.x, based on Firefox’s 2.0 Platform. is coming soon, and containes a lot of improvements and added features.
-erich
http://eric13.googlepages.com
* geoFlock: http://flock.spatialviews.com/?q=node/10.
Strange– I don’t get that behavior either and I have 20-50 tabs open all the time. The extensions I use do slow down startup, though the Firefox Pre-Loader helps a LITTLE with that.
Who knows. I wish there were better alternatives on windows just to satisfy my urge to play.
@davidicus: I tried the latest build of Opera (9.something) and am really quite impressed. It’s got built-in mouse gesture support, works with the sites I use, and behaves pretty well (so far). I’ll give it a shot for a day or so. If it doesn’t work out, there’s always Camino…
Opera has a few little things i find it hard to live without, including timed page reloads, shorthand searches, and page scaling. feels fast, too, and it’s easy to customize the interface down to next to nothing. now i’m rocking it on the wii too.
Opera’s seeming very cool so far. The UI is a bit quirky, but not fatally. It’s got a really annoying bug where it seems to re-order items in my bookmark bar after clicking them (after the page loads, the bookmarks moves in the bar. annoying). I’ll stick with it for awhile to see how I like it.
haven’t seen that–could be the skin? then again, i leave bookmarks in the menu…my interface is menu bar, tabs, nav/url/find-in-page/zoom bar and that’s it. faves in my persistent tab set or the speed dial. don’t give up!
Opera is fast, but among other things I can’t live without my Greasemonkey scripts, can’t configure the tabs the way I want (and many other tweaks that I can with FF plugins), etc. It’s nice for the occasional browse though…
Hmm… It’s not doing the bookmark shuffle on my laptop, so maybe something was funky on my desktop. It’s pretty fast. I do miss Greasemonkey a bit, but I only really used it to pull more info on Flickr pages. I also really miss the del.icio.us integration, but it’s easy enough to approach by using a separate app and a javascript bookmarklet. Not as elegant, but meh.
OK. I’m a flip-flopper. Opera’s really nice, but it has a fatal flaw. I can’t seem to find a way to force links to open in new tabs in the background. I go to a page and command+click a link, and it opens a new tab in front of what I’m reading. I have to alt+tab back to where I was then continue from there. This is really annoying, as I usually read a long page and load up a bunch of tabs to read next, without interrupting what I’m reading at the moment. I’ll poke around to see if there’s a way to do that in Opera, but for now it’s Camino time again.
mine open in the background. do you have tools -> options -> general -> pop ups -> open pop ups in background? i think that might be it.
@davidicus: I’ve tried that setting, as well as “block unwanted pop-ups” and command+clicks still open in new tabs in the foreground. Doh!
I use all kinds of Greasemonkey — saved searches and some convenient missing features in Gmail being one big one, but many other fixes for Google searches and the like. and a new favorite for fixing horrible sites, a plugin called stylish (and a few dozen more)… just no way I could use Opera full time… but it does have some nice features I wish FF would steal!
I tried disabling a bunch more add-ons in Firefox, and it’s now pretty snappy. I think it’s a memory leak that makes it slow down, so it might get laggy again…
I did find a cool Speed Dial add-on that mimics the Opera Speed Dial feature. Very cool.
Have you tried changing any of your FireFox settings? .. such as this http://forevergeek.com/open_source/make_firefox_faster.php It helped to speed it up on OS X for me.
@jason: I’ve since disabled many extensions (er, add-ons) and reverted to the default theme. It’s a bit zippier, and tabs open quicker, but if I leave Firefox running for more than a day it bogs down. Easy fix, though. Quit. Relaunch.