It seems that I’m not the only one who is giving up on Safari in its latest incarnation. Macworld staff writer Lex Friedman is also dropping Safari for Chrome, and for the same reason: Safari’s insistence on refreshing the content of a tab if you haven’t viewed it in awhile. This has a performance impact on your whole Mac.
I didn’t expect Chrome to become my browser of choice, but that’s what won. It feels snappier than either Safari or Firefox. It doesn’t grind to a halt the way that Safari does. Firefox has always driven me away because it refuses to honor the system network settings, which gets in my way when I’m at the office and switching between the wired network (with a proxy) and wireless (no proxy)1.
- I should note that Adium, my IM client of choice, also has this problem. On Adium, it’s actually more annoying: if I want to use it, I have to reset my proxy settings for each bloody IM account. I use ’em all, so this is quite obnoxious. However, if I’m in a meeting, I generally don’t want Adium connected anyway, so not using it isn’t as much of an issue as not using a web browser. That said, if anyone’s got a solution that makes Adium be a good Mac citizen, I’d love to hear it. ↩