10.5.6 Upgrade and My Safari Woes
If you’re a regular reader of MacMembrane, you know that I’m a Safari lover. With Leopard 10.5.6, however, I’ve been forced to give up Safari in favor of Firefox. The problem lies in Safari’s new inability to maintain online sessions with web sites. In other words, Safari can’t seem to remember my passwords.
You can read about the issue on Apple Support. Hopefully Apple fixes this soon. I have so much invested in Safari (especially in terms of AppleScript) that it’s almost painful for me to use anything else.
January 2nd, 2009 at 9:03 pm
I’ve also switched to Firefox a couple of weeks ago because Safari/WebKit forgets all my cookies once I restart it.
On OS X I’ve never been too fond of Firefox but I must admit that the recent beta version of Firefox 3.1 is really nice and the memory footprint is much lighter than with Safari.
January 2nd, 2009 at 9:31 pm
I’m on the current versions of everything, same as you guys, but I notice no problems. May take would then be that there’s something in the resources of the app/system that could be reset, or changed. Perhaps there’s a plug-in issue.
On the other hand, from a strictly functional point of view, I’m wondering about Firefox. With extensions, Firefox has many more features than Safari, and some of Safari’s behaviours are certainly restrictive – no native full screen, for example.
January 3rd, 2009 at 12:59 am
Patrick: yes, Safari is a huge memory eater. For me, it’s all the little things about the app that keep me loyal, especially the AppleScript support (as I mentioned in the post). But I will check out the Firefox 3.1 beta. Thanks.
CareyB: I’ve tried everything I can think of to make Safari behave. Not working at all.
Safari’s non-extensibility has never been a problem for me. I know that some will defend Firefox to the death should anyone assert that it isn’t the best browser on all platforms. For Windows there is not question that Firefox is king.
Is there a full screen mode in Firefox? I didn’t know that (and can’t find it).
January 3rd, 2009 at 6:28 am
What I miss the most with Firefox is the ability to use Services but this feature was rudimentarily implemented in the recent trunk version of Firefox, so we can expect this feature in version 3.2.
Even if Firefox isn’t as tightly integrated into the whole system as Safari or other WebKit based browser, I find it’s a decent browser on OS X and the extension give it an extra bonus.
January 3rd, 2009 at 10:07 pm
As a Web professional I use many extension in Firefox, but since this is my first new, up-to-date, MacBook, I’m using Safari exclusively so I can get to know it. As far as I can tell, for general purpose browsing, it’s just fine, except for the odd compliance issue, but you get that will all browsers these days. On the other hand, I love the tools from developer mode. Firefox needs an extension (FireBug) to do that.
I did just discover Glim, and add-on for Safari, and that gets me back a few features, including a decent full screen mode – I wrote a script to do it, but Glim is better.