racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

I’ve been a Mac user for more than two years now, but it’s only now that I’ve started to appreciate Safari. I just recently started moving away from from FireFox–at least on the Mac.

I’ve been reading raves about how Safari was lightning fast, and how Camino was quickly catching up to FireFox in terms of features, plugins, and all that. But I have been using Firefox for the longest time (the full Mozilla suite before that), and I wasn’t just about to switch away. Ultimately, it was the performance issue that made me start using Safari instead as my main browser.

FireFox is just too resource-hungry. I’ve got a (relatively) slow Mac, and I’m not just going to give all my resources to FireFox!

Also, there’s the workflow issue. I’ve been so used to FireFox’s tabbed browsing interface that I usually run it with 20 or more tabs per window, and this has both cluttered my workflow and bogged down my system. While Safari and Camino also have tabbed browsing, it’s not as easy to maintain dozens of tabs open because (1) you will run off the tab bar and have to work with a dropdown list after a certain number of tabs, and (2) you cannot rearrange tabs.

I just started this a couple of days ago, and here are some of my observations.

* Safari is definitely faster than Camino, and both are definitely faster than Firefox.
* Camino renders pages better than Safari. I guess Safari is just too standards-compliant that the least mistake in XHTML encoding breaks things up! (And we know not all sites out there have good markup.)
* I’ve grown more comfortable to the interface of Camino, which is like FireFox in many respects (it’s made by the Mozilla team, after all).
* Still, there are many differences. For one, Camino doesn’t allow you to reorganize tabs. Camino also doesn’t have session restore (which I don’t use anyway). And Camino doesn’t have those subtle refinements in the latest version of FireFox, like returning to the original tab after closing a recently-launched tab.
* I’ve come to appreciate the fact that the tabbed browsing experience is more limited in both Camino and Safari. At least I don’t have tabs cluttered all over. And I’ve learned to better appreciate working on multiple windows. Hey, that’s what Exposé is for!
* Camino doesn’t come bundled with a spell checker. And for some reason the OS X built-in spell checker doesn’t work on input entry boxes in Camino. This is a bummer especially for one who makes a living writing on blogs.
* Safari doesn’t (by default) warn you when closing windows with multiple tabs. In fact, I just pressed CMD-Q while writing this blog post and everything disappeared. Yes, all my Safari windows. Good thing WordPress has auto-save. (I’ll be looking for a plugin for that soon.) Update: I changed Safari’s Close Safari keyboard shortcut in the Keyboard Shortcuts preference to something not as easy to press.
* Safari doesn’t offer full-screen browsing by default (I guess this is against Apple’s UI philosophy, huh?).
* I miss the plugins, like FF’s drag-and-drop file attachment plugin.
* Passwords, passwords, passwords. FireFox on my PCs and the Mac have a cache of my latest passwords. Now I’ll have to key them all in again in Safari and Camino whenever I need to log in to my blogs/web apps. At least FireFox lets me take a peek at saved passwords, so I have a reference whenever I forget, when logging in via different browsers.
* I just notice TAB works better in Safari and Camino. With FireFox, you cannot tab to form buttons and dropdown menus, so you have to use the mouse to navigate. But with Camino and Safari, you can use tab and arrow keys to navigate form submit buttons and dropdown menus.

Just recently, I’ve been preferring Safari over Camino, because it’s just so darned fast, and it doesn’t take up as much of the computer’s resources.

I’m a person who would rather bear with adapting to my environment instead of having my environment adapt to my needs, whenever necessary. And given the resource constraints, I think I’m adjusting rather well to not using the browser I’m most used to. All those plugins might have been bogging down my system anyway.

Turned Off Twitter Updates

On another note, I just turned off the automatic publishing of twitter daily summaries. I’ve decided to turn those off for several reasons.

* While Twitter updates can make for substitute content in lieu of my regular blogging, I usually find myself incoherently rambling on Twitter, so that doesn’t make for good content, anyway.
* Too many Twitter updates, and too few regular posts in between makes my blog look like a link blog instead of a blog supposedly focusing on good content.
* Several of my readers have expressed their dislike of the Twitter updates (and Twitter itself, actually).

If you’re interested in what I babble about on Twitter, there’s always my Twitter status page at http://twitter.com/jangelo and the update feed at the bottom bar of this blog. BTW, here are a few posts about Twitter I recently wrote on JOAB:

* What makes Twitter so cool
* The argument against Twitter
* Do you use Twitter to chat?

So it’s back to quality programming, then!

When you close your laptop lid, you’d expect your computer to go to sleep, and perhaps after a few minutes of inactivity go to hibernate mode. This is a default with Apple notebooks—the sleep functionality is so efficient that the computer goes into suspended state in a couple of seconds and wakes up as quickly.

I can’t say the same about Windows, though. Sleep takes about 5 to 10 seconds on my machine. Waking up takes about twice as long. And hibernate? Depending on how large your system RAM is and the speed of your hard drive, you could be looking at a 30 second wait for hibernation and a couple of minutes for waking up.

I’ve assigned the power button on my Presario to be the shortcut for hibernate. I rarely shut down since I prefer to have all my work still open when I turn on the computer—opening up everything after a fresh restart seems too tedious. I only shut down completely when I really have to reboot the system (i.e., after installing applications).

But a few days ago, my laptop almost got burned because of crappy hibernation sequences. So as it was approaching noon—the time I’m supposed to pick up my wife and daughter from work and school, respectively—I hit the power button, closed the lid and stuffed the laptop into my backpack, thinking it had already started with the hibernate sequence.

This time, it did not.

It turns out that there was a glitch with the wireless connection and Windows displayed a prompt that the computer could not go into hibernate mode at that time. Stupid as Windows was, the prompt stayed on, and somehow managed to prevent the computer from sleeping or hibernating. By default, the laptop was supposed to sleep after 10 minutes of inactivity and hibernate after 10 more minutes, if on battery mode.

So as we had a quick lunch, the laptop was still running inside the backpack, which I left inside the car. As I was carrying the bag on my back upon arriving home, I kept wondering whether the heat was coming from inside the backpack or just the noontime sun. Boy was I surprised when I opened the bag. I almost panicked because the computer had been so hot I could smell something almost burning inside (the same smell when you’re using soldering lead).

It’s good the laptop survived without problems. I think that incident might have accelerated the laptop’s aging by a few months, though.

And this is one of the reasons I’m not too happy with Windows. If I had brought the PoewrBook, none of this would have happened. Thing is, the work I was currently doing was on the Windows machine, and among the two, it’s the smaller and lighter one, so it’s easier to carry around in quick trips.