Even before I had a Mac, I used Safari. This was back before I knew about all the bells and whistles that went on behind the scenes of browsers. I simply loved the way Safari looked over others. When I got my Macbook Pro, of course Safari being the standard browser, it remained my browser of choice. We’ve had a great relationship, Safari and I.
I have to say though, Safari 5.1 has been repeatedly kicking me in between the legs. It hurts.
The past few releases have been, well a little unstable to say the least. 5.0 was good. It included some features I have enjoyed and commend. But the 5.1 shit that was shipped out with Lion seemed to be yet another problem added to the “I Want To Love Lion But I Can’t Because…” list.
The newish engineering of Safari has been built around this “thing” called WebProcess. It’s neat, good on the devs in coming up with something contemporary. However it sucks. Eloquent wording, I know. Specifically though,
- WebProcess uses far too much CPU and memory space. It’s absolutely unnecessary.
- I browse with a lot of tabs, as I know many of us do. I rarely have a window open without the more-hidden-tabs icon showing. Yes, it certainly takes up a bunch of memory, but this has never been an issue prior.
- When switching tabs, Safari decides it is mandatory to automatically reloads pages. It is an action that is incredibly frustrating and unacceptable; forms have to be refilled, written material is lost, information gets erased. I have found (perhaps only one of the reasons) this occurs because Webkit2 WebProcess crashes. Disabling Java helps, but does not fix.
- Scrolling, reloading, and other actions are very slow.
It is true a lot of websites are getting much more intensive with their code. Javascript is being used in many ways, a lot of them in small chunks. There are CSS bits such as text-rendering:optimizeLegibility; that I found affect browser performance. Font rendering takes time on my machine as well. But none of these tweaks are entities that cannot be handled. I’d like to say everything could be blamed on Flash, but that simply is not true. I uninstalled Flash for a while, and nothing changed, at least not in the ways I wanted it to. Sure it slows down when it is in use, but that’s just Flash doing it’s Flashey thing.
I still unfortunately use Safari, but I tend to have Chrome open almost every time as well. I did use Chrome for a while, but preferred Safari (based on appearance and not performance). I will not that this may be less of the browser’s and more of Lion’s fault. I am sure the dudes and dudettes at Apple are trying to fix a tonne of shenanigans, but if Safari doesn’t sort itself out and find itself some new architecture, I think it’s safe to say the gap between it and Chrome will close up.
Written 9 Sep 11 @ 10:29amtagged as: Mac. browser.
