physical graffiti

After subscribing to mobileme (that's another post) and syncing my keychains safari was crashing repeatedly. I tried upgrading to the 4.0 beta (from 3.2.1) and that didn't help.

It would crash about 2 minutes after launching every time.

I tried moving all my plugins away. no dice.

I used the 'reset safari' option in the menu bar, but kept my cookies (precious cookies).

That seemed to do the trick.

Not sure why it was breaking, but it is better now. *ahhh*

with the release of FireFox 3 - i am back to using FF as my default browser.

As loyal readers know, i'm a fickle bitch when it comes to web browsers.
I think this comes from 2 things:
1) there are web standards. so you can change browsers without changing your experience (sort of)
2) Switching between safari and firefox doesn't require much relearning (opera is a different story)

But lately i find myself using 2 browsers regularly.

I use safari for mainstream browsing, and i use firefox when i need to cross over to the darker side of the web.

The issue is that many mainstream websites use scripts/flash/java for the normal functioning of their sites, and if you disable these things you get a degraded or non-functional experience.

Firefox is great because if you use adblock and noscript then you have a very safe and uncluttered browsing experience. But i found that for trusted sites noscript just got in the way.

Now that we have tabbed browsing It would be nice if one could set window specific settings, so that i could turn on noscript for a window and turn it off for another window. As far i know this is not possible, so the simple work around is to run 2 browsers.

Apple announced the release of the Safari 3 beta, which shockingly will run on Windows machines!

Two questions arise: why? is it any good?

The first question has a simple answer. The iPhone. Huh? Yes, the iPhone. The principle way for developers to get apps running on the iPhone is as webapps running through Safari. By porting Safari to Windows, Apple makes it available for developers to test their iPhone apps before deploying. It may be that Safari on the iPhone and Safari on your computer will be able to share passwords, bookmarks, etc......

Is it any good? Well, i don't have a PC to test with, but i have been running the beta on my mac, and it is a BIG improvement over the last version. It may be faster than firefox, and it seems to use less CPU than firefox. What is lacks is extensive plugins. The one i really miss is adblock. There is a plugin called pith-helmet that serves the same purpose, but it is $10.

Google has released an online calendar application, 'gCal'. It is creating a lot of buzz. I have tried it out and i like it. Unfortunately, it does not work in Safari, my browser of choice, these days.

The first question is , why use gCal?

One reason is that i use both macs and PCs, and I have not found a really good iCal compatible calendar app on my PC. Also , having the calendar live online means that i can find it and EDIT it wherever i am. It has some other nice features as well, which you can read about.

The second question is, do i need to switch browsers again?

So i downloaded camino, which is like the love-child of firefox and safari: mozilla based, but built specifically for mac. It is really fast. and it has some nice options like 'play animated gifs only once'. You might not notice this , but if you go to a website that has some stupid advertising looping over and over, it uses up a HUGE amount of CPU.

So for now Camino is king.