Still Use Internet Explorer
Posted February 3rd, 2005 @ 10:38am by Erik J. Barzeski
As much as I despise Internet Explorer, I use it daily because pgatour.com crashes Safari just about every time you visit. I've submitted countless bug reports. Maybe, later today, I'll visit 10 times in a row and submit each crash report.
IE loads faster than any other browser (maybe besides iCab). Ancient poo for everything else, it works serviceably for using pgatour.com. And for filling out forms with lots of popup menus, something Safari still doesn't do as well.
Donate Life
Posted 03 Feb 2005 at 11:32am #
Why not use Firefox? It loads pgatour.com just fine. I use it on my Mac exclusively.
Posted 03 Feb 2005 at 11:40am #
Just tested it (not that I'm a big golf fan or something, but I haven't seen Safari crash in a long, long time). It may be a matter of personal taste, but I also wondered why you are using that ancient IE nowadays instead of a Mozilla family browser. I just checked the site with Firefox and a recent Camino nightly, both worked just fine.
As a sidenote: I am using Firefox for various intranet and admin applications (_long_ pages with lots of forms in them) and I have found that Firefox is not only the fastest when it comes to rendering those beasts but also the one with the best autocompletion (especially when its database grows and you have tons of values for the same form). I know it's ugly but it might be worth a second look...
Posted 03 Feb 2005 at 11:49am #
Guys, why not Firefox? Read what I wrote next time! IE launches faster.
Posted 03 Feb 2005 at 12:08pm #
Yes, sir. I _did_ read what you wrote, I just couldn't imagine that's a priority in the G5 era - that's a difference of, what, 5 seconds versus 2? You've got to be in a permanent hurry these days 😉
Posted 03 Feb 2005 at 12:16pm #
Indeed I am.
Posted 03 Feb 2005 at 12:26pm #
You might want to rethink your usage pattern - consider something like 1. open Firefox/Camino/whatever and let it sit there, 2. click it when needed, the window opens in a fraction of a second.
Sorry, but I still don't get the point: OS X has Virtual Memory and paging, an open application normally does not use resources - I just don't quit things that much, I don't even shutdown or log out that often, therefore I have no problem with launch times.
Posted 03 Feb 2005 at 12:38pm #
Ralph, keeping an application running means that it clutters up the cmd-tab list and my dock. IE launches in 1 second. Firefox takes about 8 before it's ready for use.
Posted 03 Feb 2005 at 1:22pm #
Umm. "Clutters up your dock". I have over 75 icons in the dock so that isn't an issue for me.
I constanly invite people to try the browser they are not using however, my mainstays are OmniWeb, Safari, Camino and Firefox, with Safari slipping to fourth in frequency. IE is fifth. Icab et al aren't playing. And I am still surprised how frequently Mac Users of Firefox are oblivious of Camino's existance.
I use MSIE perhaps as frequently as once a month, more likely 2-3 months between pulling it up. And it is much more frequently because it has a cookie to a password log on site I haven't visited in as long, rather than loading speed or site compatibility.
Posted 03 Feb 2005 at 1:54pm #
I find that Camino launches faster than Firefox. Perhaps you should give it a shot.
Posted 03 Feb 2005 at 7:05pm #
I would have to agree with Erik here, having a browser taking up dock space and memory for _one_ website is a total waste.
Is it fixed in Tiger? If not, I will happily file a bug against Safari.
Posted 03 Feb 2005 at 7:55pm #
Bud: one of the beauties of OS X is that it allows the user a lot of different usage patterns. Erik is a cmd-tab guy and likes a clean dock while you clutter it with icons (75? OMG, you need one of those 30" displays to be able to tell one from the other) while I tend to use Quicksilver / Launchbar to switch and launch things and don't care too much about a cluttered cmd-tab switcher. I wouldn't work the way you or Erik would, but I understand the consequence for him. Look at what he wrote - for him, this makes perfect sense.
Mat: an app that is idle and unused does not consume physical memory - it will be paged out if necessary and OS X always swaps no matter how much RAM you have. It's no waste, this is a non-issue.
Posted 03 Feb 2005 at 10:37pm #
I really don't see how leaving your web browser open clutters up the Dock, but I guess you must have more stuff on your Dock than I do.
Personally I don't think I've used IE in nearly two years. If I have a problem with a site in Safari (maybe once every two months or so) I use a Gecko-based browser.
Posted 03 Feb 2005 at 11:40pm #
My primary browser is Mozilla because of the sublime Multizilla plugin. Safari is nearly always running because that's what launches when I click a link in Eudora -- and the Saft plugin is starting to catch up with Multizilla. I go to a lot of sites that link to free legal mp3 downloads (e.g. Salon's "Wednesday Morning Downloads") so I use Firefox for its DownThemAll plugin (not available for Mozilla). And finally, yes, I use IE because it's the only one that still allows dragging a link to initiate a download, which makes downloading e.g. a PDF or a ZIP (or MP3) directly to a specific directory a lot quicker and easier. Everything else does the 'modern' thing of saving a .webloc file instead, forcing a right-click/save-as/directory-shuffle. I usually insert a rant on the stupidity of that 'improvement' but I'll spare you.
So if you're counting, I often end up with FOUR different browsers running concurrently. Who cares? I've got 1.25 GB of RAM and they're happy to idle in the background when I'm working in InDesign or whatever. Clutter? What Clutter? Clutter is a cool program for controlling iTunes. That's often running too. And Sofa, and M-Beat and...
Posted 04 Feb 2005 at 12:36pm #
Camino launches awfully quickly...
Posted 05 Feb 2005 at 7:00pm #
I still use IE for the sole purpose of checking my pay stub online. You see, the code that pulls up the PDF of it only seems to work in IE and not Firefox. The really dumb thing about it is the cool PDF plugin that works in other Mac browsers doesn't seem to work in IE. I have to download the PDF using IE and save it to my desktop.
Posted 06 Feb 2005 at 5:19pm #
I just tried pgatour.com, and it didn't crash on me.
Wanna post or mail me a crashlog?
Posted 07 Feb 2005 at 8:05am #
The home page doesn't always crash, no, but just about every sub-section (http://www.pgatour.com/players for example) does for whatever reason. Every time.
Date/Time: 2005-02-07 08:05:44 -0500
OS Version: 10.3.7 (Build 7S215)
Report Version: 2
Command: Safari
Path: /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari
Version: 1.2.4 (125.12)
PID: 12825
Thread: 0
Exception: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (0x0001)
Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS (0x0001) at 0x90c02000
Thread 0 Crashed:
0 <<00000000>> 0xffff91b0 __bigcopy + 0x1b0
1 <<00000000>> 0x94f27488 0 + 0x94f27488
2 <<00000000>> 0x94f65180 0 + 0x94f65180
3 <<00000000>> 0x94f92f08 0 + 0x94f92f08
4 <<00000000>> 0x94fb435c 0 + 0x94fb435c
5 <<00000000>> 0x94fb42cc 0 + 0x94fb42cc
6 <<00000000>> 0x94f452d0 0 + 0x94f452d0
7 <<00000000>> 0x94f777f4 0 + 0x94f777f4
8 <<00000000>> 0x94f6575c 0 + 0x94f6575c
9 <<00000000>> 0x95306898 0 + 0x95306898
10 com.apple.Foundation 0x90a3d4b4 -[NSURLConnection(NSURLConnectionInternal) _sendDidFinishLoadingCallback] + 0x4c
11 com.apple.Foundation 0x90a0c9ec -[NSURLConnection(NSURLConnectionInternal) _sendCallbacks] + 0x1f8
12 com.apple.Foundation 0x909f707c -[NSArray makeObjectsPerformSelector:withObject:] + 0x108
13 com.apple.Foundation 0x90a21214 _sendCallbacks + 0xd4
14 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x90193ca8 __CFRunLoopDoSources0 + 0x1fc
15 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x90191560 __CFRunLoopRun + 0x1b0
16 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x90195e8c CFRunLoopRunSpecific + 0x148
17 <<00000000>> 0x927d5f60 0 + 0x927d5f60
18 <<00000000>> 0x927dc6c8 0 + 0x927dc6c8
19 <<00000000>> 0x927fe6a0 0 + 0x927fe6a0
20 <<00000000>> 0x92dd2e44 0 + 0x92dd2e44
21 <<00000000>> 0x92de98c8 0 + 0x92de98c8
22 com.apple.Safari 0x0000be30 0x1000 + 0xae30
23 <<00000000>> 0x92dfdc30 0 + 0x92dfdc30
24 <<00000000>> 0x92eba2b8 0 + 0x92eba2b8
25 com.apple.Safari 0x0000cfac 0x1000 + 0xbfac
26 com.apple.Safari 0x0000ce20 0x1000 + 0xbe20
Posted 11 Feb 2005 at 5:55pm #
Interesting Chart:
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html#macspeed
Posted 21 Apr 2005 at 3:49am #
There's a light at the end of the tunnel Erik - pgatour.com works just fine on Safari 2.0...
Posted 21 Apr 2005 at 7:25am #
Yeah, works OK in 1.3 too.