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There are two major choices on Mac OS X and they both suck rancid, gangrenous donkey cock:
Safari...nice UI, follows OS conventions, but SSL is as random as a psychotic cat. Will it work? Will it fail? Will it work part of the way through? Who fucking knows, it's Safari, and you have to guess what it will do. Got animated ads? Watch Safari lose its fucking mind and try to eat all your CPU. Javascript? Shit, that's russian roulette with three bullets there. And a plugged barrel. Safari's fast, except when it's off in SCROD land. Here's a hint, oh mighty Safari team...if it's fucking spinning that fucking colorwheel of fucking doom, it's NOT FAST, BECAUSE I CAN'T USE THE FUCKING THING. HOW ABOUT IT NOT LOSE IT'S FUCKING MIND 9087520349587 TIMES A FUCKING DAY! COULD YOU MAYBE PUT "DOESN'T LOSE IT'S FUCKING MIND" ON THE TOP OF THE LIST OF GOALS FOR SAFARI?? MAYBE?? Oh, and the dumbest, and I do mean dumbest fucking autocomplete that ever was. Holy shit, it autocompletes on PASTE ops, and if you go PASTE-ENTER, well, hope you wanted some fucking autocomplete, because by god, you're going to fucking get it. Jesus, do the people writing this code actually use the fucking thing, or do they only use bookmarks chosen by Steve?
Firefox is more reliable, but I'm tired of shit that treats the OS like an afterthought. Shit like, oh, I don't know, PAGE UP/DOWN should just work. Keychain integration. A preferences system NOT designed by a mad Russian monk with a small penis. No, I honestly don't give a fuck that it runs on more than one platform. I don't see it being a pain in the fucking ass on Windows, so why is it a pain in the fucking ass on the Mac. Shit or get off the pot. I want a UI that's a proper Mac UI on Mac OS X, and whatever the fuck passes for a proper UI on Windows. One size does not fucking fit all.
I just want a browser that fucking works, with tabs and some AppleScriptability, a sensible autocomplete, ala IE 5 on Mac OS X, and that can handle normal shit like animated gifs and SSL without crying.
Is that TOO much to ask?
Before it starts, I've tried Opera, I've tried Omniweb. I hate them both more. Don't even bring those shitpiles up or I'll kick you in your intarweb nuts.
Oh, and someone tell me why the Acrobat 8 PDF plugin takes minutes to load, only runs in one browser, and requires fucking MYSQL to DISPLAY A FUCKING PDF IN A FUCKING WEB BROWSER?!?!?!?
:SDHF{ PWE {IP*) +) $_ HI:LHDFOUGD(_D*6*888^*65*66!!!!!!!!!
Technorati Tags: Firefox, Web Browsers are all Teh Suck, Safari
Posted by John C. Welch at 00:06 | Permalink
Comments
"Bitter, party of one!"
Seriously, have you tried Shiira? I'm not plugging it particularly, just curious to hear your opinion.
Posted by: Brian | August 20, 2007 12:23 AM
You've probably already done this, but check out Camino - it's Gecko with Mac integration.
Posted by: Andrew Bloomgarden | August 20, 2007 12:37 AM
I would suggest Camino 1.5, but previous versions of Camino have clung to the cache like a pit bull to a toddler's leg, even through reboots of the machine. No rilly. 1.5 seems a little better but YMMV; however, they have made a cursory attempt at OS integration (using Keychain, Aqua interface elements, preference setup that makes the baby Jesus cry somewhat more quietly...)
Posted by: Jon | August 20, 2007 12:37 AM
Being that I'm lacking nuts, I'll ask if you've given Camino a go. It's still missing AppleScript support, but it's at least a little bit more Mac-ly than Firefox.
Posted by: Nadyne Mielke | August 20, 2007 12:39 AM
Meds John, remeber to take your meds :)
But i feel your pain about safari. But it's still better than Firefox. Firefox is s l o w.
/thomas
Posted by: Thomas | August 20, 2007 1:41 AM
Safari works well for me... not sure what the SSL problems you describe are. I really only get the SBOD with over 300 tabs open, and even then not all the time or particularly often with 500. Activity monitor suggests at those time the computer is swapping, so I guess we know why...
Posted by: PatrickQG | August 20, 2007 2:24 AM
May I suggest the Mac optimised version of Firefox...
http://www.beatnikpad.com/archives/2007/07/02/firefox-2004
Posted by: Ben | August 20, 2007 7:15 AM
I'd say it's not the browsers, it's mostly the goddamn advertising (and the remainder are corporate web sites coded by ad agencies instead of web developers). I never see Safari have a problem with ad-free sites. Never. Want to hoist someone? Start with DoubleClick.net, from whence an endless stream of invalid HTML and slow-responding javascript calls comes.
Posted by: Robert | August 20, 2007 8:41 AM
Nadyne, Camino would be a decent option, but with it, (and firefox too for that matter), I have to either use Google for my newsfeeds, (ugh) or an external application, (lame). If Camino ever decides to let me read feeds in my browser, which is what I want, then it would become a much better option.
(To all the RSS fans, Yes, I know that Google, or whatever application you use is the best thing EVAR for RSS. I like it in my browser. Not as a web page, or as a way to pull up some other application, but in the browser itself. )
Patrick, I have regular issues with Safari and SSL, usually in that it can take a looooong time, whereas FF just pulls them up with barely a difference in times.
Robert, the fact is, you're not going to get advertisers to start caring about the quality of their code, there's no money in it, and quite frankly, I expect a modern browser to fail FAR more gracefully than Safari does when encountering imperfect code. Until someone gets humans out of the process, HTML and Javascript will be imperfect. Dealing with that gracefully is what I would call a basic functional requirement.
Besides, Safari's Javascript sucks ass right now, and the version 3 betas/Webkit versions are somewhat better, but still not as skilled as FF.
Posted by: John C. Welch | August 20, 2007 9:08 AM
Hmm...looking at the Camino blogs, it appears they are taking AppleScript more seriously than Apple, (THERE'S a big shock), including Bookmarks.
If they keep up with that, and were to give me built-in RSS and .Mac support, Camino suddenly becomes a real contender
Posted by: John C. Welch | August 20, 2007 9:33 AM
*tears* Thank you for one of the best OS-X browser-rants I've ever read. I needed that. ;-)
As for your Adobe Reader problem, I haven't yet been able to *entirely* ditch it, but I have had some reasonable luck with Skim (http://skim-app.sourceforge.net/); it even lets you annotate and save the changes.
Last time I checked, there's no browser plugin though, so you're stuck opening PDFs in an the external app. I find it worth it, YMMV.
Posted by: radiantmatrix | August 20, 2007 10:25 AM
Holy crap...the auto-complete during Paste...THAT is what has been driving me bugfuck crazy with Safari...I didn't even realize wtf was going on there (having transitioned over from Camino/Firefox recently) til you mentioned it. And by mention I mean ranted. :p
Seriously, wtf is up with that?
Posted by: darth | August 20, 2007 10:37 AM
Darth, it's just someone not paying attention to things. They got the first 80% done, but that last bit, namely, "How do we make this feature work so it's not more annoying than it's worth" isn't there.
Posted by: John C. Welch | August 20, 2007 12:54 PM
You should still check out Camino, even if it doesn't do RSS, as it's a very nice browser. (and recently I've run into a website which does not work at all in Firefox, but works perfectly in Camino.. makes no sense, but go figure)
Are you running Safari 3 beta? I find that it works great, except that the memory leak problem is still there. (although the memory leak seems to be fixed on Leopard..)
Oh, and if you weren't aware, Safari (either 2 or 3) leaks like a sieve on tiger. So be sure to quit and restart it at least once a day. (Or keep an eye on it in Activity Monitor .. when its real memory usage gets to be more than 50% of your available RAM, then you really need to kill it.)
The memory leak is responsible for most Safari slowdowns (due to memory being paged in/out) and most others are caused by poorly-written Javascript (although this is not much of a problem in Safari 3, which runs Javascript much faster)
Posted by: Tim Buchheim | August 20, 2007 1:01 PM
If it helps, I hate Firefox on Windows, too, in general.
Then again, I can't think of a browser on any platform that doesn't make me want to smash it with a hammer at least on occasion.
Posted by: Sigivald | August 20, 2007 1:46 PM
See, that's the problem. Browsers are this great bastion of "well, it only makes you bleed a LITTLE, so it's almost good". That's just bullshit. The Web has really nicely defined standards, and failing gracefully isn't rocket science anymore.
Yet browsers continually suck.
Oh, Tim, I know it seems strange, but the RSS stuff is actually pretty important. It lets me work more simply in fewer applications. I like that aspect of it, and honestly, until Safari had RSS, I never used RSS.
Posted by: John C. Welch | August 20, 2007 4:27 PM
Being a Browser coding veteran by now, mostly working on the client side of things with tons of cross browser css, scripting (with plugins) and mark-upping fun, I feel your pain. Maybe even a bit more.
Every web dev I know has a love-hate relationship with Firefox and Safari. (Only IE 6 manages to be universally reviled.) The problem with people who write code for browsers is that they rarely do any actual web development, so they have no clue what kind of stuff intelligent coders come up with to get the most out of browsers. And since most web devs couldn't code in C++ if their lives depended on it, what is left is the ultra-slow process of submitting bugs and hoping that some volunteer or dude at Apple actually takes the time to implement it, and that the powers that be decide that the patch is worthy of inclusion in the next public release, or maybe the one after that.
An extreme example of the browser coder / web coder disconnect was when Apple released Safari 2.0.0. Within minutes I and many others found that it cached the results obtained via XMLHttpRequests, of which they also forgot to properly implement the status property, breaking just about every ajax app in existence. (This was before they released webkit nightly builds.) If anyone at Apple then actually was involved in web tech this wouldn't have happened, but as it stands I still have special case code for 2.0.0 / 1.3.0 clients in my library.
Also, I personally have completely given up on IE. v7 is less of a shithole than 6 was, but only just. Also, WinFF sucks just as bad as the Mac version, just in different ways. E.g. with the latest update, everyone at the office was relieved that now it would only crash every 4th time instead of every 2nd time they tried to print something. Now that's progress.
The frustrating things is that it seems we're _SO CLOSE_. Browsers ALMOST work right, except that each one has a couple of extremely annoying interface and / or rendering, scripting, etc. bugs or issues.
Also, as for ads / page noise, I just use the hosts file approach. I have a hosts file with about 375 ad-serving domains mapped to 0.0.0.0. This makes about 95% of my surfing time very peaceful, pages almost zen-like empty, and not to forget page load times quite a bit speedier as well. For annoying flash ads I just use a bookmarklet that nukes each and every object/embed and iframe on a page and I put it in the bookmarks bar as the first item so I can hit Cmd-1 and Annoyances Be Gone. Low tech and remarkably effective.
Posted by: Arthur Langereis | August 20, 2007 5:18 PM
Have to vent somewhere so I'll post here - what the hell is wrong with developing a uniform way to create web pages for every f***ing browser in the world!!! I've spent the entire day creating a bloody page template and it looks different in EACH bloody browser and EACH bloody browser version!!!! F YOU BROWSER DEVELOPERS!!!! I'M PISSED OFF!!!!
Posted by: Zouii | October 28, 2007 11:42 AM
I totally agree! The only browser I really like is Epiphany. It is built on top of Mozilla/Firefox (not sure) but it integrates with Gnome in Linux. Awesome browser, too bad they don't have it for Windows/Mac.
Posted by: Brody | January 3, 2008 7:29 PM
