Firefox for the Mac: Forget it
My love for Firefox has limits.
At work on a Windows PC, I practically live in the browser and dip into Internet Explorer only to fill out my expense reports (a Java interface for the online system won't work with Firefox but only IE).
I don't know how I lived without the Mozilla browser.
On a Mac, though, I will have to. I don't know what people who say “Firefox is way faster than Safari” are smoking because Firefox is sluggish as all get-out, particularly on G4-based Macs (ranging from my iMac G4 to the latest, just-released 15-inch PowerBook model).
Safari, by comparison, is a speed demon (roughly comparable to Firefox on my aging Pentium III workstation at the office).
I finally exported my meticulously organized Firefox bookmarks to an HTML file, then imported them into Safari on that PowerBook using a program called Safari Enhancer. Finally, I synced them over to the iMac via .Mac.
Update: Several readers respond:
1) I just read your blog about Firefox on the Mac. In case you haven’t tried them, you might want to try these “G4 Optimized” builds, located here: http://homepage.mac.com/krmathis/. I’ve been using them for quite some time and find them faster than the builds produced by Mozilla. You can also find them at http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/archives/000677.html. I’m using them on an Alum PB, G4@1.5mhz, OS10.3.8. Good Luck.
2) I use FF (v1.0, v1.0.1 nightly, and v1.8b2 nightly) off and on. Most extensions work with v1.0.1 now and a fair number with 1.8b2 which is important to me as they add many features I expect which the developers left out.
I would not consider FF on my machine to be slow compared to Safari though I have not made a point of trying to do comparative tests as such. (My Mac is a Digital Audio with a 1.33 GHz GigaDesigns CPU uprade and 1 GB RAM on a recently upgraded 5 mbps cable connection.)
Although I concur with the approach of using whatever works for you, I do not know that the results you have encountered are all that representative or are the result to be expected.
While I do not know why your installation is slow, I can observe that large bookmark files can be somewhat slow to load during the initial launch. On the other hand Safari seems to be slow when opening my large bookmarks file and then having to close it to resume browsing on that particular tab (I wish Apple would bring back the side drawer/sidebar).
In any event, you might get some guidance by posting your problem on the Mozillazine.org forums.
3) Hi there!
Actually...there's a better mac-specific alternative than Firefox if you want a Mozilla/Gecko-based browser: Camino. Camino is fast, written in Cocoa, and feels much more like a Mac application by taking better advantage of native OS X UI elements. At this point, I mainly use Safari for browsing, with Camino as my backup for those few sites that simply don't play nice with it. I haven't been forced to crack open IE for months now. :-)
Linkage for Camino: http://www.mozilla.org/products/camino/
4) Response to you post re: Firefox.
I also understand that Firefox is using some other routine for drawing to the screen (see this page re Aqua compliance:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/roadmap.html), but will be sometime soon. I have noticed that the scrolling is jerky on my G4 400. My guess is that the transition to Aqua/Quartz will speed thing up.
Here is a snippet from an eweek article:
On the Mac side of things, Goodger said Firefox 1.0 uses Apple's QuickDraw technology to draw to the screen, while the Windows version uses GDI. However, he said the next big move for the Mac version of Firefox would be away from QuickDraw.
QuickDraw, which Apple created in 1984, was the basis for 2D screen presentation in the Mac OS. With the advent of Mac OS X, Apple moved away from QuickDraw to its PDF-based Quartz rendering system, which is now incorporated in the Core Graphics architecture of Mac OS X.
“We were most focused on the feature set and user interface,” Goodger said. “Maybe not for the next couple of months, but we plan to move Firefox” to the more modern rendering system. Firefox's reliance on QuickDraw, he said, is due to the fact that the low-level code of Firefox comes from Mozilla's Netscape 6 and 7 projects, which was largely coded in the years 1999 to 2001 for the Mac OS 9 operating system.
