The Devil's Kitchen: Browser wars

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Friday, September 01, 2006

Browser wars

Posted by Devil's Kitchen at 9/01/2006 08:43:00 AM

Flock: my browser choice for the moment: we'll see how we go...

On a tech note, I have been playing around with web browsers of late. I was using Safari but, alas, the WYSIWYG text editors on the Content Management Systems that I use did not work with it (Apple: take note!); so, dissatisfied with Firefox's speed (although they are building a Mac OS Cocoa version, codenamed Minefield, which appears to be a little swifter), I then swapped to the Mozilla-based Mac OS 10-only browser Camino.

This worked quite well, but I found* that it was using unacceptably large amounts of RAM: about 200MB of physical memory and about twice that in virtual memory. Quite simply, it was slowing my whole machine, especially when I was running RAM-hungry applications such as Photoshop and Freehand.

I have now switched to Flock which is another Mozilla-based brower but is developed seperately from the Mozilla Foundation; it renders pages properly and swiftly but Flock has several other advantages. The first is that its RAM requirements are about half of Camino's: I have been able to see a significant speed increase over my whole system throughout the few hours that I have been using it.

The second is that I have been able to import all of my RSS feeds** from News Netwire Lite. Since NNW also uses a reasonable amount of memory, switching to Flock has allowed me to free up about 200MB of physical RAM and about 600MB of virtual memory. This has to be a good deal. I shall continue using Flock and we shall see how it performs***.

UPDATE: You can get capability enhancing Extensions for Flock, including Firefox extensions (which can be automatically converted).

* Using Apple's Activity Monitor.
Path: Applications --> Utilities --> Activity Monitor

** My only reservation is that I would like to be able to refresh my RSS feeds at will; currently Flock merely checks them every half hour.

*** Also, I don't like the way that the Bookmarks work: there are no dropdowns from the Bookmark bar. However, a quick rearrangement and splitting of my Favourites into more categories seems perfectly adequate for now.

Posted by Devil's Kitchen at 9/01/2006 08:43:00 AM

2 Blogger Comments:

Anonymous said...: You have got to be kidding. Flock has huge memory leak issues. Try leaving the thing open for a few hours, and check real and virtual memory use. Its a pig. Try grabbing an optimized build of Camino, and compare!; 9/01/2006 01:26:00 PM
Devil's Kitchen said...: That's partly what I am testing at the moment.

The trouble is that all of these browsers seem to have large memory leak problems. Why?

DK; 9/01/2006 01:28:00 PM

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