Web browsers

How many do you use?

Here at Hyde U, it's Sea Monkey, Firefox, Safari.

Likely to NOT include SeaMonkey, pretty soon...and maybe Firefox goes away too.

Why? I've been using Mozilla-origin tools since Netscape 1.0 (an old friend, jwz, was one of the authors).

But Mozilla-originated tools are pretty poor these days. SeaMonkey is the worst, for sure, which is unfortunate because that didn't used to be true.

Why?

Memory bloat. There are memory leaks in there somewhere so that the runtime memory footprint slowly ratchets up day after day, and the cpu usage ratchets up too, and eventually I have to restart the app, and occasionally reboot the machine.

Right now, I have SeaMonkey running, but it's just about dead--thread performance is poor once the mem-footprint bloats up, so that keystrokes and mouse-clicks take forever.

Firefox is doing ok at the moment, but not great.

And this is true regardless of whether it's on Windows or Mac.

Now of course it could be that it's a 3rd-party plugin, no way for me to know, but since it happens on both machines, that seems less likely.

I still think IE is dangerous. So I just about never use that. "Edge" not yet clear...

I might be checking out Chrome soon...

The key problem about punting SeaMonkey is what I use to read email after that?

Later: OK, the problem with Mozilla-origin tools is EBay. It might be other websites, too, but EBay is extra bad, whatever they are doing causes the bloat, which means things are tickling the memory-leak bugs. It mostly seems to be motion-oriented, i.e., Flash, movies, animated GIFs, whatever that sort of thing is. Tis as though there's a background thread that runs them, and it fails to properly de-allocate RAM when you leave a page open with these things--they run forever. I'm not even convinced that closing the page would be enough--like that bg thread keeps on going. Later: gad. tis worse than I thought. You'd think each page/tab would have its own lightweight process, but that's not the case.

Also later: been using Chrome at work. Stinks. Later later: well, it has an interesting feature about letting you see what each individual page is up to. And guess what--each page/tab has its own lightweight process, which is why you can see what each page is up to. That's nice. What I think stinks about Chrome is the complete lack of menubar options that Firefox has.

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MUCH Later (12/26/17): Firefox 45 (yeah, I know, old, but it's that last version that installs on Mountain Lion (upgrade from 8 to 10 coming ~3 weeks) tells me:

"Firefox is now twice as fast, 30% leaner than Chrome and more awesome by a factor of 87 (it's all very technical). Upgrade today!"

Hm. Well, I still have to use Firefox some, because Mtn Lion Safari has issues about SSL with some websites (not sure what, the messages are fairly limited). Occasionally its just timing, I think.

I keep hoping that they are going to discover these memory leaks and resolve them. Faster than Chrome would be better, but likely invisible on my satellite internet service. I need to memory problems to go away.

1:87 is HO scale.