Sad Day, finally gave up on Safari
 

**taps plays in the background**

After years of being, I think, the only power user hold out using safari, last night I gave up on it. I always liked safari, it was light, quick, and a lot cleaner looking than firefox or camino.

Lately though it has just been crash happy, support for flash has progressively gotten worse, and over all speeds have decreased.

The good news is that Firefox has an add-on that deletes flash cookies on the fly, I dig that.

Problems with Safari are rare in my experience. Did you empty the cache or reset Safari?

Chrome is out for OS X now, and while the official release does not support extensions yet (the beta one does) it may end up being the firefox killer. Safari has never been that great of a browser for me because it lacks extensions I use in Firefox all the time. I feel that Firefox has really declined in performance over the last few years and Chrome is also a webkit based browser. So, it should have the same light weight feel and speed Safari does.

I still find Safari incompatible with some websites, which is a pain. Never ever had a problem with Firefox being incompatible with any sites.

Safari has been terribly buggy for me lately, but I can't stand how sluggish firefox feels. I might have to give Chrome a try...

buggy is the word. We must be experiencing the similar issues. I also agree that firefox feels sluggish, I would also add bulky. I don't like the way it handles rss compared to safari, I also really use safari's bookmark bar shortcuts a lot, sucks to lose those.

cleared everything and reset. also cleared all of the flash cookies ( I should add this process is a lot easier in firefox, so there is one point for it).

I think there are some other issues with my computer too. I haven't formatted in a while and it is usually my practice to do so every 6 months. I also think my hard drive is nearing the end of its life. I'll give safari another try once I wipe or put a new HD in.

Bad idea. This isn't Windows, so it's unnecessary, and doing it puts extra stress on the hard drive.

Give Chrome a try. It is also a webkit browser you may like it.

I'm not defending Safari but I don't get the hoopla over Firefox. Versions .8 and .9 of Firefox were great - it all went downhill since 1.0. I think now FF is a big pile of donkey manure and it just keeps getting worse with every new update.

I am defending Safari!
I really don't see any problem with it. Earlier versions, sure, it could be a bit temperamental, some sites wouldn't work and so you had to use FireFox.

But now, it's mature, fast, and does exactly what it says on the tin.
Buggy? Nope, never had it crash that I can remember.
Flash works fine: I can watch YouTube video and all the tedious website intros fine.
I view PDFs int it natively too, not using Acrobat.

Most of the problems on this board with Safari are because of third-party "Add-ons". I'll admit I've never seen the point of all these extras - same for FireFox extensions.

I do a lot of "research browsing". I have lots of windows; lots of tabs. I use Facebook and allsorts. Never had a reason to complain about Safari.

I agree with benwiggy and have had similar success with Safari. I do use one plug-in (1Password) and it doesn't give me any grief. On my MBP I don't notice much speed difference between Chrome & Safari except that I can't use 1Password. On my trusty dual-core G5 (Leopard), I can't use Chrome. Nuf said.

I still find it buggy with flash driven web apps, and there are a lot of those in academia. Almost all digital text books are wrapped up in some sort of flash app you use your browser to navigate through. Safari poses some issues with these, Firefox never has.

I have several add ons I can't live with out either: mouse gestures, adblock, grease monkey, web developer, firebug, delicious, and drupal firebug.

I admit, I am not your average user though

You are of course free to use whatever browser you like, but....

I couldn't find any help thread that you had started on this site asking for help with your now crash-happy Safari. Any reason why you haven't tried to seek help for trouble with a browser you like so much?

Your console and crash logs should provide some information as to why Safari seems to be playing up on your system.

Wow, been using Chrome for 24 hours so far and it continues to impress. It's snappy too, like Safari, and it isn't being buggy. (The last straw for me was when Safari refused to load up Facebook, Chrome did it so I switched. We'll see if I look back at all...)

Hi Jay,
I have never had safari do that with Facebook..??? how odd.
Do you have a guess as to why it did this?

You know, it's one of those things were I can't be bothered to figure it out... There's just been so many problems lately. To be honest, switching browsers is a pretty painless, so... What I'm saying is that Chorme is working (and working well) so I'll use it until I'm given a great reason not to.

...but, in the name of science... What would happen is I would try to go to a page in facebook and it would try to load for a split second and then give up. I would click on it repeatedly until finally, on some random try, it would decide to actually download the page and display it.

Tally one more for the dump Safari crowd. I hate "top sites" and can find no way to get rid of it. Private browsing still puts cookies on your machine. Safari has become bloated.

Chrome sure seems to be faster.

Interesting how this seems to be inevitable with browsers. Quite a while ago now, I tried Camino which is a Gecko based browser; a subset of Firefox with a GUI much more Mac-like and no plug-ins. It was fast and fairly bombproof. They gradually "improved" it to the point that Safari seemed a better choice. Now Safari is doing the same dance adding RSS reader capability, etc. and Chrome is fresh and brisk. I find Firefox entirely bloated and if you use a bunch of third-party plugins it's unreliable too. Neither Opera nor Omniweb have ever appealed to me. Shiira, based on Webkit, was a flash in the pan though I understand it's back in development again. Just wait; Chrome will get larded up too.

BTW under the General Tab of Safari's preferences you can set the New Windows and New Tabs open with an empty page -- no Top Sites.

I think what folks are responding to with Chrome is really its simplicity. I'm a strong-believer in single-purpose applications; combos, IMHO, never do any of their things really well. I like NetNewsReader for RSS feeds, currently use Safari for browsing only, but playing with Chrome. I'll probably switch to Chrome when the 1Password plug-in for it gets out of Alpha into a strong Beta. That's what keeps me in Safari with all its alternative stuff turned off.

I didn't like it either when I first tried it, so I disabled it. Can't remember exactly what I did, but googling "remove top sites from safari" brings up loads of pages.

(I think I just stopped it from saving cached copies of every page I visit. It's still there if I want it, but it's not doing anything and isn't in my way at all.)

Personally I still feel like Safari is light weight, that's not my major concern. I just feel like it's too buggy. It has been having a bunch of rendering/page loading errors for me. Sure, I could try and fix it, but I have so many other (good) options, so why bother?

Chrome is still working fantastically, btw. It's the first Google product that I've found visually appealing (well, aside from the funny way they do tabs, other than that...). I like how the tabs open and close, I like that I can put the bookmarks bar to only appear when I create a new tab. I really like how the address bar doubles as the "google" bar, I figure everyone ought to be doing that.

And on top of that it's made in Webkit which is awful snappy. What's not to like?

That it will not run on my PM dual-core G5 which is stuck in 10.5.8. I do run it on my MBP (10.6.2) and like it there. I'm not ready to buy a new Mac yet, so I'm stuck with using two different browsers.

Well after a week on Firefox I decided I couldn't take it anymore and I would track down the issues I was having with safari/flash.

Turns out I just had to create a text file called mms.cfg and write:
OverrideGPUValidation=1
then saved the file to

Library/ Application Support/Macromedia

and all is well

Live.twit.tv and hulu are working, so I am back on safari again. Found the solution on an ubuntu forum. I'd recommend trying this to all who are having flash issues, regardless of browser.

I've only watched one full episode of colbert so far but it played great at high res, so we'll see what happens.

Here are the links.
ubuntu
adobe

to get rid of top sites just change "open new window/tab" with blank page

@detorn
Thanks guys ... that did the trick.

@AEH; you are welcome, but I'm not sure that the Top Sites engine isn't still fetching that stuff in the background; it just doesn't show any more.

I would use safari more often but there are a few things I have to have...

Delicious book marks

firebug

mouse gestures

web developer

pop up blocker (one with advanced settings)

Does Safari have any of these add-ons available?

One thing I found that helped was to check my Font Book & resolve duplicates. Give that a try.

Understand. Guess I am a paranoid curmudgeon when it comes to privacy and I don't like cookies hitting my machine from all over the net... places I've never been. Have Safari set to only accept cookies from sites I navigate too, but too many links or something just keep dumping cookies on me.

My solution is I use Safari for financial stuff where the banks/credit card companies require cookies or they think you're a hacker and hit you with security questions... one bank as many as 5 questions if they don't find their cookie. For everything else, it is Chrome with NO cookies and dump the session from history when I'm done. Working out well so far and Chrome is continuing to convince me it is slightly faster.

Couple three times a year I erase unused space on the HD, too. Overkill, I know, as I really have nothing to hide except maybe the fact that I am paranoid.:)

In this day and age, Internet Paranoia is healthy.

I've had Safari crash on me several times lately--actually just refusing to start and needing a force quit. I could trick it into starting by clicking on a webloc, but starting from the dock it froze. My solution was to ditch the p-list and reset my toolbar prefs. Facebook has been no problem. My biggest complaint is no ftp access.
Leonard (OS 10.5.8, Safari 4.0.4)

i fnally started using chrome. so much better than safari.


i'm also a newish mac user. safari is like the IE of browsers.