I am not a browser enthusiast. In fact I don’t believe that a browser needs much functionality. What it needs to do most is get out of your way. It’s nice to have bookmarks and tabs but every browser has such functionality now. There’s some enthusiasm among Firefox users for changing the browser skin, but I prefer to see as little of the browser as possible. Firefox has some excellent plug-ins for web development that makes it a no-brainer for that task. It also has a bewildering number of other plugins that mean nothing to me.

All I want from a browser is:

1. Speed.
2. Tabs.
3. A Usable Bookmarks System.

Just about every browser has 2. and 3., including Firefox, Safari and IE (although IE is not available on the Mac for reasons I don’t understand.) But recently I’ve been getting a little irritated with Firefox. I saw too many spinning wheels.

Now, I get the browser performance issue reasonably well. I’m aware, for example, that sites which constantly update the web page can place a heavy load on the computer, and I avoid such sites (and I avoid using applications like Tweetdeck and Twhirl which do the same thing) because I don’t like my internet activity impacting computer performance.

The problem is that while my Mac (a Desktop Pro) has 4 processors, a fist full of memory and is very powerful, most software doesn’t know how to behave. Firefox certainly doesn’t. It can often be found hogging a processor with 100% usage. So I decided to try to tune it. Here’s how you do that.

Instead of entering a URL, enter about:config in the URL area.

A page will come up that reads as follows:

Click on the button and you will be presented with a page containing a surprisingly long list of all the Firefox parameters that you can tweak. You have to know what to tweak, but there are resources out there on the web to help you. The best one I found lies at the end of this link.

So I messed with the parameters and tried the new settings for a week, but I still got performance issues. So I messed with them again changing just about everything. After a couple of weeks, I was still dissatisfied.

Then I saw a story on the web saying that a new version of Safari was available, so I downloaded it. I had got into the habit of watching Firefox’s behavior using the Activity Monitor, so I simply spent an hour doing the things I do on both browsers and watching the two browsers. Safari 4 never, absolutely never, used more than 25% of a processor while I was watching and I saw no spinning wheel.

That was it for me. I switched.

Having said that, there are some things that I will continue to use Firefox for. I’ll use it for web development, because it has some really useful plug-ins for that purpose and I’ll use it for SEO tracking where it also has some useful add-ons. But for general browser usage, I’ll stay with Safari – at least until I find a problem with it.