Am I the only one who thinks Safari beta 4 is a disaster?

From all the Safari-praising reviews, I had fairly high expectations of it when I eventually got curious enough to download and give it a try. From the onset I knew it wouldn't have anywhere near as much features as Firefox or Opera, but I'm one to overlook that in a program if it does its core tasks well.

I don't want to be harsh, but it was difficult to find anything positive about Safari other than its good looks. Right off the bat it throttled one CPU of my dual-core processor to death. On its third run it literally sucked up almost 700MB RAM and I was forced to kill it via Task Manager. It tries to foist Bonjour on you, and its updater keeps asking if you want iTunes and Quicktime. No ad-blocking. Middle-click on a tab doesn't close it. Alt-D to focus the address bar keeps producing an annoying "ding" sound. You can't tell the search bar to not store previous search entries, and AFAIK you can't add custom search engines either.

Is anyone else having these problems?

 

Speed is not everything, one of the reasons I use Opera is due to its overall consistent behavior and interface. Its solid security, good resource use and best balance of overall speed. I would again reiterate, IE8 is an excellent alternative today, it runs fast, has low memory consumption and gives FF and Safari a run for money. I use the x64 version of IE frequently and love its speed and performance.

 

I'm inclined to agree about IE8; I've switched from Firefox and Opera to IE8 and Iron myself. I'm just wondering if I'm missing something with Safari, given its almost universally positive reviews.

 

My general impression of all Safari builds is that it's a buggy piece of junk. It appears quick at first, but Chrome is quicker IMO, and Opera is a lot more reliable. I'm using IE8 also, it's much improved and not bad now.

 

No matter how good safari is, as long as apple software keeps bundling s*** like bonjour, mobileme, and whatever else, it's not going near my systems.

 

Safari in general seems to bring a whole lot of baggage. Not sure what it's like on the Mac.

I'm going to agree with some of the above posts. I've chosen to use Opera most of the time because of the overall package. Firefox is my other choice although I can't stand it's sluggishness (even 3.1 beta).

 

Safari DOES bring a lot of baggage, though I too have not seen it in action on a Mac system. It may seem a bit harsh of a statement, but I dare to call Safari nagware. I've gone back to using just IE, though I may give Iron a shot since it's one of the very few browsers I haven't tried. Mozilla, and it pains me to say this, they can have 3.1 beta back. It's the same old Firefox as usual.

As far as Opera goes, it is so, so quick, but I hate it (using 9.6). I don't like the tab system, it crashes often, blah. IE8 hasn't given me an ounce of trouble. Anyway, back on topic, lol, yes, Safari has a lot of issues and I won't use it anymore.

 

Opera is usually rock stable here on Linux or Windows, if its crashing, it has to be a plugin or Java related issue. Several PCs I have installed Opera in never experience any crashes. Even in net cafes Opera runs day in day out without issues.

 

I'm telling you, Opera for me is a curse, lol. It's the reason I stayed away from it since its 8.x days. Not knocking the browser, it just never works out for me. Java works fine, and the only other plugin is flash, which also works fine. It can crash on text pages. It'll either freeze solid or, out of nowhere, just close itself like I closed it manually. The damndest thing, I swear. But anyway, this isn't a "help me with opera probs" thread, so I'll get back on topic

 

I know I hate that too. I wanted to download iTunes (just iTunes). Apple bundled Quicktime with it.. that was ok because sometimes you need it for viewing videos. But now they also bundle Bonjour, MobileMe, nag me about Safari and nearly 5 other unnecessary start-up processes. Windows Live does the same thing. I just wanted to upgrade my Windows Live Messenger from the 2008 version to the 2009 version. It wanted to change my homepage, change my search, install the Live toolbar, and install other Live programs like Photo Gallery etc.

I don't like all the "bloat" that these companies try to give you.

 

Currently I have one sure-fire way to crash Opera: right-click a file and choose "Save to download folder", and close the tab before the file can show up in the Transfer window. Instant crash np.

There's also been crashes (caused by DEP on Vista) when downloading certain torrents. I can't reliably replicate this, but I do know that setting DEP to OptOut doesn't help, for some mysterious reason.

If you've tried Chrome, Iron is exactly identical except it uses the newer version of WebKit, comes with an inbuilt ad blocker, and lacks the phone-home features. SRWare also offers a portable version, which I'm using now.

 

Hmm, in my case, I tried that, no crashes on Windows but in Linux, it hung for a while but didn't crash. I have full hardware DEP on under XPx64 with LUA, no issues, probably happens with Vista.

But then I can make Chrome, IE8 and FF crash as well or hang.

 

Is there any difference in using Chromium vs Iron?

Chromium has:
- Up to date with (cnu manual update)
- No google logo, updater
- Adblock vi Adsweep.js
- Userid can be manually changed to null via LocalState file

 

Good question. I suspect any differences would be privacy-related but then Chromium *appears* to be solid in that regard, anyway. One thing I did notice was that SRWare has totally removed the following from the Under the Hood tab in Options:

- Show suggestions for navigation errors

- Use a suggestion service to help complete searches and URLs typed in the address bar

- Help make Chromium better by automatically sending usage statistics and crash reports to Google

Of course, one can simply uncheck the aforementioned boxes in Chromium but I like the fact that those options don't even exist (no possibility of any of them being enabled) in Iron.