As I’ve mentioned before, I work on a G5 iMac. Supposed to be blazingly fast, right? I mean, reasonably good processor, reasonably sleek OS, what’s not to like? And yet, I’m constantly seeing delays when switching between tasks. It could be argued that this is because I routinely have eight or more applications open at once, but these days who doesn’t?
I’ve figured out a couple of the bottleneck applications. The MS Office Suite is a problem sometimes, often taking longish periods to come to full consciousness. (Excel is a little worse than Word in this respect, but then I use Excel much more frequently so that’s a big problem.) My TeX editor seems suprisingly bloated. But recently I’ve been forced to conclude that the worst, most consistent offender is Safari: the web browser done it.
My main evidence for this is that switching to and from Safari takes a lot of work, even when there’s but a single web page (that doesn’t “do” anything) open. By contrast, switching between iTunes and iChat, or MSN Messenger and Terminal, takes about as long as it takes me to hit Apple-Tab. OTOH, this varies with how long Safari’s been open, so it might just be a case of bit-rot or something.
In any event, between this small epiphany and Elbie pointing out the existence of Google Maps — which does not, right now, support Safari — I figured that it was time to take Firefox out for a spin.
So, my first complaint about Firefox: while it claims that it will import your bookmarks etc. from IE “and other browsers”, the other browsers in this case seems to mean “Netscape”. Won’t import Safari bookmarks; if you tell it to import from a file, and point it at the .plist file from Library/Safari, it’ll blithely ignore you. And there’s no obvious way to export bookmarks from Safari into, say, and HTML file like Firefox expects.
Damn it.