BatFlattery

OK, I’ve finally given up on Firefox. I know I’m supposed to like it, I know it’s the hope of the free world, the Rebel Alliance fighting the good fight against the Microsoft Empire, etc etc, but I’m just tired of it killing my PowerBook all the time. I’m tired of my Mac feeling like a 486 PC with 8 megs of RAM, struggling to run Windows. I’m tired of the exhaust fan coming on every time I move the mouse, because Firefox has eaten up all the free memory AGAIN, and OS X has to shunt more pixels into and out of virtual memory to redraw the screen. I’m tired of waiting for Gmail to catch up with what I’ve written. I’ve had enough.

It’s not like Safari is that bad, anymore. It has tabbed browsing. It doesn’t screw up so many sites anymore. And if you have to have a Mozilla-based browser, Camino is pretty darn good. I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks now, and I like it a lot. It uses the Keychain to store web passwords, which is really nice: it makes me feel much more secure about my important passwords, and I can find them easily if I want them for another browser. Plus, it has an “update stored password” function if you’re trying to log onto a site you haven’t accessed for awhile, and your first password guess turns out to be wrong: it simply notices that you’ve typed a different password the second time, and offers to update. Nice.

And it looks pretty nice too.

Of course I’ll keep Firefox on the machine, to check the appearance of my web pages, etc, but at the moment I mostly use Camino and Safari for actual web browsing. No more painfully-slow Mac. No more periodically shutting down Firefox just to get it to let go of all the memory it hogged. No more worrying about opening Photoshop with Firefox running. Oh joy!

John Gruber on the “canaries in the (Mac) coalmine”.

I certainly agree with his analysis, and on a personal level, having come back to Mac via Linux, there is no freakin’ way I would go back now, not even if Ubuntu is the best Linux install ever. It’s not just about the OS (although I still don’t see how any PC OS can ever achieve the level of hardware integration that OS X has); it’s also about the software. Only those who have never used Photoshop seriously can say that the Gimp is equivalent with a straight face. And what about BBEdit? Plus all those really cool Apple apps, like Garageband, iMovie and iDVD. I’ll take Mark Pilgrim’s word that iMovie doesn’t let you export your edit points; but so what? It’s virtually a free app! What do you expect? If you want to be able to re-create your edit from the raw footage on another machine, you’re likely to be way above the target audience here. Apple sells real applications (for serious money) that do this; they’ve been used to edit feature films, so they must be in the ballpark. So pay for them, or put up with the limitations of the free apps that come with your Mac. Don’t whine about “closed formats”. It’s nothing of the sort.

In fact, the more I read of what Mark Pilgrim and Corey Doctorow have written, the more convinced I am that these people are the most atypical Mac users (probably the most atypical anything, to be honest) I know of. They’re not canaries. They’re the weird birds who were hanging around the canaries when the miners caught them, and they flew away because they got bored. Or neurotic. The mine is safe.